More than Survival, More than Awards

Posted on January 23, 2006 in Blogging Reflections

I suffer from bipolar disorder. An article over at Jane’s blog about recognition caused me to rethink, yet again, my sense of identity. The bipolar label no more encompasses who I am any more than asthmatic or diabetic. My name is Joel Sax and I am more than my diseases. I am more than my survival of these diseases. I am more than any reward.

For every blogger who gets “recognized”, many more never get more than sparse attention. I compare my comments, for example, with others and see that I receive fewer, especially when I feel stressed and strained, than others. The other day, for example, when I described how my post-traumatic stress disorder formed and how it continued to ooze out, the relative dearth of comments puzzled me. It hurt to write that article. I can understand the difficulty of the topic for many and I am not mad. But I don’t seem to attract support like others do.

And there are those who get even less in the way of support. A few blogs I visit get only one or two regular commentators: me and someone else. I feel for those people — which is why they’re in the right hand column. Boldly Going Nowhere, Painfully Cool, Iconochron, Literally Liberal, and Will Brady are a few of the people who deserve more of a following than they have, who get fewer visitors and fewer comments than I do. None of these strikes me as cliquish. But then none of these rams her or himself into a hole, a peg upon which you can hang a label for their identity. Like me, they talk about all kinds of things that interest them.

But we’re conditioned to expect that our pundits do only one thing. Sufferers of bipolar disorder, for example, are expected to talk only about bipolar disorder. M. Luminous of Boldly Going Nowhere doesn’t have a neat label for herself. She’s a lot of things and that’s why I like her stuff. The same holds true for Shelli of Painfully Cool. You can point to others like Bill of Prairie Point (who has about the same number of regular commentators as me) and Nancy of Under the Fire Star. The best label for us is “eclectic”. In this task-driven age, we’re told that we “lack focus”.

There also seems to be a strong connection between the “look” of a blog and how readers measure its “content”. Write rings around everyone, but have a boring or crooked design: people will think that you don’t have much to offer. A shallow, inspidly written blog with a gorgeous design might well attract more attention.

My long time blogging friends don’t fit the Categories. They don’t necessarily have pretty blogs. But there is passion, real passion in their writing. The world, they feel, needs to be grabbed with both hands and given a shake. We’ve been at this for years, never allowing the disappointment of anonymity and the cold comfort of survival when others have gone to the wayside lead us to devalue our writing. We are not only bloggers, but passionate persons looking beyond our selves and our interests to the flies and the butterflies blowing on the wind around us. Even the term “blogger” is too limiting for us: we are human beings.

To them and to all of you, I say:

Blog on even if no one else reads.