Question I have to decide this weekend: do I waste cash on renewing the website package, or do I set a static author page on the domain name and pull the privacy plug on the blog?
The answer is leaning towards door #2. I’m trying to talk myself out of the idea, but I’m having a lot of trouble convincing myself there’s a point.
Oh, I’ll keep writing. both here and elsewhere. I will draft, edit, polish, and perfect my prose and publish it. I will offer it for sale to strangers. I have more momentum lately than in months. It’s been a long crawl out of the rocky wilderness of Spouseman’s Cancer Recovery Adventure, but I have plans and I will make all the things.
But the part where I share that journey online in this shielded social space and elsewhere? That doesn’t have to be part of the picture. And honestly, spilling my heart’s blood into this chasm of silence is beginning to bug me. A lot.
When the only people who offer any affirmation on my posts are total strangers, when my blog has many followers but gets a bare handful of reads, and even those few readers rarely bother to click a button; when I get zero social media extension from most of the followers whose writing I respect– all those things send me a bitter scream of a message.
The message is: “This doesn’t rate. We’ll save our efforts for others.”
My instinctive response to that message will always be to walk out the door and take my precious, glorious, unappreciated words somewhere quiet and full of solitude.
Because this shit does rate and I will defend myself from the roaring winds of Disdain however I must. I had hopes for this being a way to connect and share, I really did, but the numbers just aren’t there. Evidently I do not improve with repeated exposure.
Writing is never complete without readers, but I refuse to break off bits of my soul and throw them into an abyss forever. I have a comfy nest on a shaky perch of just-enough-confidence. I have things I burn to say, stories I yearn to tell–
The upside? I won’t waste time on formatting, checking spelling and so on. It’s much easier to spill my private thoughts in public and ignore being ignored when I don’t have to clean up punctuation and wonder if anyone’s paying attention when I wear no pants. Metaphorically speaking.
Being ignored in a crowd of people all exchanging compliments is painful. Being all alone in silence is more peaceful.
Damn. And here I started this post trying to talk myself OUT of retreating. I am open to counterarguments.
But I don’t expect any, because my mama didn’t raise no fools.
2 responses to “Apathy is a killer”
No counterarguments, just an observation – I never get much feedback on my blog either, though long gaps between posts occasionally elicit ‘are you okay?’ from people I’ve never heard of before, and I’ve had some appreciation thrown my way since deciding I was taking an indefinite break. I think people tend to read and enjoy blogs and just don’t comment. It’s not just you.
In the end it will always come down to your own free will; the desicion being yours to make. I could say “Don’t stop.” and mean it. Why? There’s plenty of reasons. I enjoy it. I learn things from it. There are insights to be had, beyond just your avenue of art. It both increases my desire to write (inspired) and not (sounds like a huge pain in the ass). There’s humor to be had, and then there’s this post. There are four sites I follow without fail, yours and three others related to what I do. Am I lazy because I only show my apprectiation though Facebook, probably. It’s *my* major filter; I don’t like spreading myself thin through multiple social media sites, because I’m not built that way. But not today, today here is more important.
I’m just a fan and a friend, I can’t ever really offer the kind of support from a writer’s perspective and barely from an artist’s. So my voice is just a distant whisper, and it is far from being enough of a counterweight on the scale, but it *is* whispering “Don’t stop.”