Recently, a series of personal problems have been testing my self esteem. I lost myself in my writing and blogging, hoping to find some some esteem. When an article I felt really good about was published recently, my heart broke when the first comment on the blog was a nasty slap in the face.
I found tears running down my face. How dare they say those things? They’re not even close to true. It’s not what I said, intended to say, or even thought of saying! I felt slammed down and stomped on.
Screaming inside and pissed off at the mean world, I went for a walk, stomping my feet against the gravel road to work out my frustration. When I got back, I took another look and realized that what they said wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was pretty harmless.
I had let my self worth become wrapped up in my blog. Surrounded by personal pain, I’d let my perspective become distorted. I felt everyone was out to get me, and the universe proved me right.
Does this happen to you?
Allowing Our Blog to Become Personal
For a lot of bloggers, our blogs are very personal. They are the avenue we choose to express ourselves, our passions, feelings, opinions, creative energies, sorrows, and joys. Caught up in the connection between expressing ourselves and providing information we believe to be helpful and valuable, it doesn’t take much of an insult to make us reconsider our blogging self worth.
Writing a blog can be an intimate way of communicating with the world. We put a lot of energy into what we write. We explore all the ways we want to say it and how we say it just right. We fuss and fret over every word to make sure it says what we want it to say, using just the right words to get our meaning across. We think about our readers and what they want to know from us. and we do our best to give them what they want.
When those good intentions are met with scathing or radically opposite views, are you crushed? Are you hurt?
Sometimes when we’re feeling bad, it feels like the whole world is out to get us. The evidence is all around us, telling us we’re no good and useless, right? Information passes through the filters in our heads, allowing through only what we want to hear, not reality. The last place we may want negative reinforcement is through our blogs.
I’ve had posts with tons of positive comments, and only one negative. Which one do I focus on? Can you guess? Do you do that?
There are some bloggers who must have really thick skins. They put themselves out there, exposing their inner most thoughts and feelings, rants and rages, passing all barriers to objectivity. And business bloggers representing a business that takes a lot of punches, usually getting a few in the blogging face. What courage to keep blogging in the face of expected attacks.
And they still keep blogging.
It takes some serious callouses to have the ability to ignore it and keep on blogging. Doesn’t it? Do you have it?
When your blog post is attacked, what do you do? How do you respond? Do you? Should you? How do you keep blogging when you feel the world is out to get you?
Or do you just take a walk and come back to find out they really weren’t out to get you after all? It was just you out to get yourself? And do you then just keep blogging?
Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress.
