Into the Blogosphere: Losing and Finding Yourself

Though the process of becoming a blogger, I’ve run the dangers of losing myself to the call of the computers, the whispers from the web. They beckons me to turn every incident of my life into a post, an update, a tweet, until I see things only as potential material for online use instead of enjoyable moments of life. Breathtaking views become compositions for sharing, for accompanying posts and being turned into graphics—anything but a view.

And then of course there are the statistics. The likes. The increase or decrease in followers. The advertising strategist in me follows the trends, gauging which topics excel and which seem to be complete failures. From a marketing standpoint, the more online activity on my part, the more generated activity on the part of others…but at what point is such activity only done at the cost of your enjoyment of the real life that takes place off-line?

Having reached this point, I am forced to take a step back and find myself. What do I really want to say? Am I part of the blogosphere just to tell people what they’d like to hear, to discuss trends that everyone else is discussing or to word things in ways that are most likely to earn myself another follower, another like? Or is this more personal, about sharing the things that matter to me, writing about things I’d like to examine, regardless of whether anyone else seems similarly inclined?

Posting, tweets, updates…they all have to be something I do because I want to share something with others, not just to drive up numbers or garner comments. My self-esteem doesn’t rest in how many people follow me or whether anyone liked my last post. Though it’s always an enjoyable feeling to know that others enjoyed what I enjoy, the truth is that as long as I enjoyed it, it was worth it. Once one crosses over from writing in silence to writing in the magic world of the blogosphere, there is always this feeling that others are there, with you, and this desire to know what they think of what you say…or if they even care. And while I hope that there are others out there who find what I have to say amusing, enlightening, and thought-provoking, if no one finds them as such but myself at the end of the day, at least I have done myself the service of being my own voice, of being faithful to the one person who always reads whatever I write.

Copyright 2014 Andrea Lundgren