Yesterday I was overcome with the desire to check my traffic on Sitemeter. I haven’t done so in quite some time, and I thought the ignorance was working well for me. I used to get daily emails about traffic from the previous day, and I used to agonize over the information. I needed to feel like more people were reading what I had to write or that I was failing somehow.
Then I realized that was a stupid way to be, so I stopped having Sitemeter send me those emails, and for a while everything was pretty nice. The blog didn’t feel so forced anymore, and I actually started enjoying it again. I’ve even allowed myself to put up posts that are really only funny to me, and I haven’t regretted it. But something happened yesterday and I wondered, “Is anybody even reading anymore?” And that’s such a stupid question.
But the fact that I think it’s a stupid question is part of the problem too. I haven’t been able to reconcile in my mind the idea that a blog is an interactive medium, and that there has to be give and take with it. While I’ve been writing for me, I haven’t really been commenting on anyone’s blogs, though I’m still reading as many blogs as I used to, and I haven’t even been commenting on my own blog, which I used to do all the time. Though when I was writing for the constantly fluctuating audience of the internet, I felt tied down to the blog, and thought about killing it more than a few times, even though I was getting traffic and comments out the wazoo.
I’ve yet to find the balance between writing for myself and also getting the feedback that I like to get. I won’t pretend that lots of comments are meaningless. Quite the contrary. I love checking the RSS on my comments and seeing that there are new comments. It’s great. But I also don’t want to feel like I’m being controlled by the blog either.
So what’s all this whiny, panty-bunching, sissy-talk about? I guess it’s to say thanks to everyone who stops by, whether they comment or not. Also, the writing may get a bit sporadic for the time being as I get back into being the type of blogger who comments on other people’s blogs.
I’ve turned comments off so as not to seem like a comment-whoring, pity-party bitch.
