Thinking

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this blogging thing lately. I originally started this blog so I could get my feelings about some pretty heavy issues out of my head. I was dealing with infertility, depression, anxiety, Stage V endometriosis,chronic pain, and a myriad of other things. It was kind of like my diary. It was also a place I could complain about stuff or simply write about how hard it was to deal with the above issues. I didn't have many readers beyond my immediate family, and it didn't matter. I didn't care about comments, or how many people visited. I had no idea what "bloglines" was. I had a few select blogs that I read, but not very many and I would only check them a few times a week. Fast forward ten months. All of a sudden I was obsessed with reading a long list of blogs. I put a counter on my blog to see how many people were visiting. I was excited when someone whose blog I read would leave a comment on mine. The topic of the blog changed from my diary to our adoption journey. I tried to keep the tone of the blog upbeat. I tried not to complain too much because it seemed like that's not what people wanted to hear. I certainly got more comments on positive posts than negative ones. And all of a sudden it mattered. I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes some people's blogs so popular and others not so much. How come some blogs are in everbody's links section and mine is only on a few? What makes people leave comments on some people's posts and not on others? Obviously a great deal of this has to do with the writing on each blog. There are some truly amazing writers out there in blogland, and I am not one of them. Some blogs are very humorous and bring a smile to your face whenever you read them. Mine is also not one of these. All of a sudden it seemed like a popularity contest. Like High School where the cheerleaders hang out together at the "cool" lunch table and the geeks like me eat lunch alone. I was never in the "popular" category. I never have been and probably never will be. The thing is, before I started this blog, I didn't care. This blog was mostly for my benefit. I noticed lately that I have started to care. I care if people are reading. I care if people are leaving comments, and I want to be on other people's blog lists. But I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to be poplular. And I hate that I care. I wish I didn't. I mean, I don't even know any of these people! Why should I care if they're reading and/or commenting on my blog? It's easy to get caught up in it. I tend to get very emotionally involved in things. Lately I have been having a hard time keeping that upbeat tone. I know that it is the depression creeping up on me again. It started as soon as I came home from my trip to S.F. I miss my niece and nephew so much(and my sister). I have so much fun when I'm around them and seeing them five or six times a year is not cutting it. When I come home from visiting them, it magnifies everything we are missing by not having children. Our house is so quiet. There hasn't been a lot of laughter lately, mostly because I am depressed and in a lot of pain and overall just in a rotten mood. The summer is looming too, and that has never been an easy time for us, for reasons I explained in an earlier post. Don't worry, I'm seeing a therapist and am going to a new psychiatrist next week. I am getting help. I'm not trying to cope with this alone. I guess what I'm getting around to is, I need to distance myself a little from blogland. I want this blog to be mainly about the adoption and right now nothing is happening with it. We're in Limbo, for an indeterminate amount of time. I can't post happy, upbeat things right now, so I'm not going to post anything. I may update once or twice a week with things like "Corners of my home" and such, but I don't think I'm going to use it for a diary anymore. I'll still be reading the list of blogs I follow, and commenting too. But I won't be posting as often as I was. I'm pretty sure this didn't even need an explanation and not very many people care either way, but I wanted to post something rather than simply dissapear without any explanation at all, at least for my family who read.