I had a bit of a wobble this morning. Chuffed with the social media reaction to my blog Love is the answer, which I wrote in the minutes following the announcement of Steve Wright’s death, I decided to drill through my blog’s statistics. When the comments on social media are positive, it usually means the numbers are good. Here, I run into a quandry. What does good mean? What kind of number would represent good? The actual number, well, wobbled me. It sent me briefly into one of my ‘WHY DO I BOTHER?’ moments. 27 people. Is that all?
Bear in mind this episode, I think you can call it, lasted minutes, maybe even seconds and not minutes, it is not worth overplaying the significance, if there is any. But let me be honest. I had a moment, where for a moment I felt slightly tearful and very sorry for myself. ‘ I HAVE GIVEN THIS BLOG EVERYTHING,” I shouted inwardly. “TEN YEARS ON AND JUST 27 PEOPLE READ MY BETTER STUFF? I’M A FAILURE, I’M NO GOOD.” It passed quickly as I regained my equilibrium.
It was almost as if because I am currently in a dip in my mental health – nothing worth sectioning me about, yet, doc – I am looking for things to make me even more depressed, to justify my diagnosis. It’s a mental version of self-harm, that’s what it is, and I absolutely know it to be true and real. So, let’s try to look on the bright side.
If 27 people went out of their way to read some of my work yesterday evening, then I should be pleased, not disappointed. Since some of them went out of their way to offer me praise, too, then that’s good, that’s positive. Just because I have several hundred thousand less readers than, say, Sarah Vine and Nadine Dorries in the Daily Mail, does that really mean they are better writers than I am? Who knows? What I do know is that I don’t have the benefit of proof-readers and editors to help my work become more coherent. With my writing, what you see is what you get, raw and sometimes visceral, perhaps, rough around the edges and straight from the heart.
The wobble soon passed because the vague dream I had in 2014 when this blog began of achieving vast readership status and a cottage in Tuscany to produce my copy fizzled out pretty well straight away. And if this blog attracts dozens, scores and sometimes hundreds of readers and, crucially, that these readers get something out of my work, then what I am I whining about?
