A Day to Bare Our Souls - and Find Ourselves

IF NO ONE READS YOUR BLOG, DOES IT REALLY EXIST?

One thing about blogging is how selfish it is. You assume people are genuinely interested in you, what you have to say or what you are interested in. Yeah, yeah - we all want to "educate & enlighten."

We also ask our friends, family, coworkers and people we brush on the street to read our blog. We sign them up for blog catalogs, lists, aggregators, Technorati... ad infinitum. We check our Sitemeters. We cajole people to get on our mailing list or subscribe to our feed. We look to see our latest position on the TTLB Ecosystem.

I have been blogging for 4 years. Until this year I was very quiet about it. Just for fun. The majority of my energy went into my children and my anti-abuse work. I didn't want to think about myself. But as I am working on healing from years of mental & emotional abuse - my therapist told me to start taking my strong opinions to the web. I was systematically taught to squelch them or not share them because my self-esteem had gotten non-existant. Through my blog however, I am starting to come back to life. Even if no one is reading it.

And this is not including the time we spend reading & commenting on other people's blogs so they come to ours. Schmoozing site editors. There are a variety of blog rating sites that have cliques on them with a pecking order similar to a locker room in junior high school. Where low ratings, hacking and exclusions replace towel snapping, wedgies and stealing your clothes to throw them on top of the lockers.

Bloggers can be found cruising some news aggregator for a good blog. (hey, I see you clicking around to online porn or ebay when you say you're writing). IMing someone to say "hey see what I just wrote!." We also spend time debating or answering some email we got about something on our blog. (I spend time tracking down therapy or domestic violence resources for people sometimes late into the night.)

We assume someone wants to read us. What if... what if they are just as self-involved as we are?

Blogger Etiquette
by Wendy Belzberg

I admit it: after filing a blog I invariably check to make sure it's been posted. Then I check again, often several more times, to see how many people are reading it. You couldn't do this having written an old-fashioned newspaper or magazine piece, which introduces new questions both for the egoist and for the existentialist: If a blog lands on a website and no one reads it, does it really exist? Do I?

Well, on one such morning I meant only to stop in briefly before continuing on with the rest of my very compelling morning plans. But there were the faces of so many other bloggers, all of whom had toiled to hone their opinions and tweak their humor, in search of that expert cocktail of sibilance and allegory; it seemed plain rude not to read what they had to say. Some headlines genuinely did not interest me; I skipped several blogs in much the same way I overlooked the entire math and physics curricula in college. And as I am now blind to the spinning and high impact classes on the gym schedule. As for all of those bloggers who touched on appealing subjects, I thought it only polite to drop in. And in this world of ever diminishing politeness, of lapsed social standards, I feel fiercely about holding the line.

Before I knew it my morning -- and all those compelling opportunities to accomplish anything -- had dissolved out from under me. I went from blog to site to study to port; I jumped from link to link as a frog between lily pads. I learned about leg veins, brain cancer, multiple sex partners and the ozone layer. I started in one publication and ended up 8 windows later reading publications I have never heard of. I laughed and marveled at a particularly good turn of phrase and I took a moment to appreciate the time that went in to everyone's effort. But these were still hours of my life I would never get back.

I stopped short of clicking on the comment option--raising again the existential conundrum about whether an unread or uncommented upon blog had really been written. But stopping to comment on those blogs would have meant never having time to write another of my own -- not to mention ever again eating, sleeping, finding the time to berate my children, or to wonder if I am going to turn into my mother.

So I ask all of you: how is it that anyone who sets out for a jaunt in cyberspace is able to get up from her desk without hours of time elapsing and nothing concrete to show for it? Am I the only one with a full life who is so easily diverted--I might say trapped--by everything the internet has to offer? There may well come a time in my life when I will be thrilled to stand on the sidelines, engaged in a virtual life on the other side of a screen, spending hours discoursing with people I have never met and never will. Now, however, it just feels like every site is an invitation to go down a rabbit hole, however enticing, with the possibility of no way back.

I am genuinely interested to know how other people navigate. And yes, that's a transparent invitation to add comments to this blog. Because after all, then you can reassure me -- as I begin to melt into the virtual world -- which I still really exist.


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