Yesterday, I wrote a blog post about how I was looking at things. While that could describe every blog post I’ve ever written, I also had a specific intent and investment in an outcome yesterday: I hoped to generate more comments from my readers.
Here’s some interesting data: that post got fewer comments than any other blog post I’ve written for several weeks, if not months. (I’m not giving you exact data here, because I just gave up going deeper into my past posts, to retrieve that number.)
What went “wrong” yesterday? Why did I get fewer comments, when I was trying to get more?
I really can’t answer that.
However, I shall now do what I often do, when something unexpected happens. I shall try to make meaning of it.
Does my getting such a low number of comments yesterday mean any of the following?
- Yesterday’s post (or other recent posts) sucked, and I’ve lost readers as a result.
- Yesterday’s post (or other recent posts) did not suck, and I’ve lost readers anyway.
- I’ve peaked in terms of reader satisfaction, and it’s all downhill from now on.
- People were too busy to comment yesterday, for lots of reasons.
- People saw through my scheming attempts to get more comments and rebelled, as a result.
- Some things people communicate just inexplicably get considerably more or fewer reactions, as others may have experienced.
Some of my guesses, above, might be off-base, especially since they involve mind-reading, catastrophizing, and other unhelpful, distorted thoughts.
So I may never know why I got so few comments, yesterday.
Does that matter?
Probably not. As I’ve often heard and do believe: quality, not quantity, is more important. And the comments I got yesterday were very high quality, indeed.
So why am I writing this post, today?
Because, honestly, I had moments, yesterday, of feeling
- disappointment,
- rejection, and
- confusion
… about the low number of comments.
There were also many moments, yesterday, when I did NOT feel
- disappointment,
- rejection, and
- confusion.
There were many moments I felt:
- grateful
- connected, and
- clear.
In those moments, I was appreciating what I WAS getting, here in the blogging world and in my other worlds, too. I was present and mindful — at work, home, and elsewhere — amid many challenges.
Also, when I was feeling grateful, connected and clear yesterday, I spent some time thinking about what blog posts I might write, in the future.
For example, I thought I might write a blog post, at some point, called “Tomorrow’s Girls.” I considered including, in that post of tomorrow:
- my thoughts about the realities of being female in a hierarchical system like, say, a major city hospital (or other environments and cultures),
- some photos I took yesterday of young women near the campuses of Simmons and Emmanuel Colleges:
- and, as a musical bonus and tie-in to that post of the future, the official video of a Donald Fagen tune, “Tomorrow’s Girls.”
But here’s a dilemma for me:
How do I write — authentically and empathically — about sexism that I experience for myself and witness others experiencing, without losing people I care about in the process?
That’s something else I can’t answer today.
Before I end yet another imperfect post here — where I struggle to balance hopes and fears about connecting with others — I want to say more about my yesterday.
I wrote a draft of today’s post last night, very similar to what you are reading now. And, I did something else unusual, too.
I asked my 16-year-old son to read it. I didn’t request that he tell me, honestly, what he thought, because I figured he would do that, no matter how I introduced it.
I was, I admit, a little anxious about how he might react.
That turned out much better than I feared (as things often do). He and I had an interesting and long-ranging discussion about sexism, where I learned a lot.
Today, I still don’t know how to write about that topic here.
Perhaps this girl might be figuring that out, tomorrow.
Thanks to my son, to my boyfriend, to my male cats, to girls and boys and men and women whom I encounter at work and in all my other worlds too, and to you — of course! — for being here today (and, perhaps, yesterday and tomorrow).