IWSG: Blogging

 

    So, this month's question is:

April 3 question - How long have you been blogging?  What do you like about it and how has it changed?

    That's actually a kind of depressing question for me. 😅  Because it turns out that it will be exactly ten years this summer.  Which means I'll be turning 50 soon(ish). 😱

    See, I started blogging soon after I turned 39, posting daily as I went through the voyage of entering my fourth decade.  Uh, also at the time I thought I wanted to hastily enter into a romantic relationship because I had this weird idea in my head that there was something wrong with turning 40 without having had one, and so I thought I'd use a blog to chronicle that journey and then I promptly did absolutely nothing about it, and upon actually turning 40 I sat down and looked at my life and realized that I actually viewed the idea of entering a romantic (or sexual) relationship as pretty darn scary, and so much of my stress and unhappiness just melted away.  (Proving that you're never too old to sit down and figure out your own sexuality.)

    So, anyway, that was very late in the summer of 2014 that I started that blog (it was on Wordpress at the time, only they kept making more and more changes that made the free accounts more and more unpleasant to use until I finally said "screw this!" and decided to migrate elsewhere, ending up here) and that means I'm close to a full decade of blogging.  Though it's not been steady; for a lot of that time, these IWSG posts were the only posts I was putting up.  (This was the case before leaving Wordpress as well as after.)

    I like how blogging gives me a chance to just sort of say whatever I want (within reason) at whatever length I want.  When I get really invested in a topic, I can go on endlessly about it, and most people don't want to put up with that, and the beauty of blogging is that no one has to put up with it:  if I want to write ten thousand words about cheese, I can, and if no one wants to read all those ten thousand words, they don't have to.  (Uh, not that I'm likely to write ten thousand words about cheese.  I just thought that sounded funny as an example.)  If I start prattling on in person about whatever I'm into, whoever I'm talking to either has to suffer through listening to my nonsense or has to be rude enough to say "shut up already!"  That's not the case in a blog, since I can't tell if someone who visits a post actually reads what's written there or not, so there's no worry that I'm inconveniencing anyone.

    A lot of the biggest changes to blogging, for me, have been that switch from Wordpress to Blogger.  It's not just a question of formatting and Blogger having fewer widgets, but of audience.  Wordpress had a lot of built-in audience, and you could search the whole site for blogs by their tags, and if Blogger has anything like that, I'm unaware of it (not that I've really spent much time looking at other blogs since the change, as I have more drains on my time than I used to), and certainly not seeing any traffic from it.  (Most of my traffic on the blog seems to come from bots, in fact, though at least they're not posting spam comments.  Not sure what they are doing, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️ )  In a way, I kind of like the lack of an audience, because it means no pressure to produce interesting posts, and I actually do like the idea of just screaming into the void to vent my thoughts/feelings.  But on the other hand it's also kind of frustrating that if I do happen to post something clever or interesting, no one will see it.

    There's also the change of not feeling quite as...hmm, how to put this?  "Pressured" isn't the right word, but neither is "motivated," though they're both a bit related to what I want to say.  Hmm.....

    Well, I'll try to fumble through without the right word.  Unlike when I started (post-turning 40, I mean) I don't feel much compulsion to post to my blog, so I end up posting very sporadically, with IWSG being the only constant.  (That's one of the reasons I decided to do April A to Z this year, for the first time in ages, to try and get me posting regularly again for reasons other than NaNoWriMo.)

    Hmmm.

    I feel like there ought to be more to say, but I can't think what it is.

    (That seems to happen to me a lot these days.  Getting old, maybe...)