Sometimes I visit and make little persnickety changes to the layout of my little blog. Everyone else's blogs always look a lot cooler than mine does, and this is good for them because they have people who read their blog. So they really deserve to have better-looking blogs. It works out. But sometimes I think I can make mine look cool like another person's, so I waste like 30 minutes to an hour clicking different templates and color options and wishing I could just click and drag certain page elements so they would be exactly where I want them...
And then I realize I haven't actually posted anything on my blog and I think maybe I should do that...So here I am, posting something on my blog.
How do people do this? How is anyone confident enough (I think "confident" is the word I'm looking for, but it isn't exactly right--bear with me) to ask people to read their blogs? I think that ultimately, the reason I don't tell anyone about my little blog is that it seems dangerously akin to inviting people over to look at your slides from a cruise you took. The pictures are simply never as interesting to the people you invited as they are to you. Your guests look at them and remark upon them, but they are only photographs depicting an experience they did not have.
I don't really know anyone who has a blog. Not personally. My dad keeps a few in fits and starts as it serves his purpose-of-the-moment (a motorcycle trip or a class he's teaching), and although I think my dad is a really interesting guy, and a brilliant writer, I hardly ever read his posts.
However, I have like fifteen or twenty blogs bookmarked. They are the blogs of strangers, whom I have never met. These women (they're all women) live in different parts of the country than I do. And I check their blogs (ugh--wish there was a synonym for blog that didn't sound vague or pretentious!) every day, sometimes more than once.
They aren't doing anything particularly fascinating. Lots of them are crafting stuff and cooking stuff and taking attractive pictures of the things they make. But often they just write supershort posts about the weather or their children or like a random encounter at the grocery store. And I'm addicted to reading these things! That's crazy.
So I don't want to tell people I know about this here blog because I don't want to subject them to my cruise-photos (and I can't tell my dad because now he'll know I don't read his stuff...).
But sometimes I comment in the comment sections of the ones I do read, but I don't include a link to my little blog. Why not? Wouldn't I like to be a member of this internet community? Don't I want people to see that I make stuff on a sewing machine too? Well, yeah. I do want that. I would like it if someone commented on one of my pictures, and said "oh I like that." It would feel absurdly, outrageously gratifying.
But what if I start including my little link on every comment I post and no one says anything? Or...here's the thing: there are a million little doubts like that one which keep me from linking. And when they're all in my head at any given moment, they transform me from a relatively well-adjusted woman into a brace-faced 13-year-old, sitting at a cafeteria table and trying to find something to say that won't reveal me for the spazz I am.
The big craft blogs--and by "big" I just mean the ones that lots of people read, that present beautiful and simple, expertly crafted objects (not to mention lifestyles)--are like the popular girls in the lunch room. I want so badly to be able to be like them, serene and bubbling over with creativity and positivity and resourcefulness! I want to have lots of people complimenting me every day, too.
But I am a spazz, you see. I will go long stretches without posting anything or sewing anything. I will shift the focus of my life from fabric to needing-to-lose-weight-really-badly(!) and consider maybe inventing a new blog to chronicle that experience. God, I'll hatch some crazy plan to sell stuff on Etsy and get discouraged that no one bought one of the four things I posted...I did that. Already.
Those women are amazing. They're artists, professionals. They work so hard all the time, but I am lazy and not particularly skilled. I hate myself when I find I've taken on the jaunt, breezy tone of one of their posts, because I do not talk that way and I don't have the experience and skill to deserve it. When I sew, I swear and cheat and improvise weird solutions to problems no skilled seamstress would ever actually encounter. And I give stuff up and I stop right in the middle of a project to check to see if anyone has posted something on their cool blogs in the last 37 minutes.
I feel like a loser, and I think maybe if I just changed the layout of my little blog I wouldn't feel like such a wannabe. Then I realize I should write something and turn out this insanely neurotic piece of trash, when I would be much happier walking Dog or just messing around on my sewing machine.
It's a vicious cycle, is what I'm saying. Amateur/spazz/procrastinator/sloth/brace-face/aspirant...Repeat. Not necessarily in that order every time, but those are the components.
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You and me, Sadie, just keepin' it real!
ReplyDeleteSo good to tell the tales of the messiness and uncertainess of real life. It's probably better in a way than sweeping that under the carpet and only showing the world your perfect side, which only further perpetuates other people feeling like they should be perfect too, which only contributes to more neuroses all 'round, and so the cycle continues. So ARRRRRRRRRrr soulemama! I'll get you yet!
This was a great post and I loved your writing.
I agree, great post! For me, I sometimes have to remind myself that I blog for me not for others. And that if no one reads, or comments on a post, it is not a reflection on me. A blogs worth is not based on the number of comments or followers, its more like smiling at a stranger...you never know how far of an impact that one smile may have!
ReplyDeleteps. I am having a blast reading your blog!