I suffer from dreadful insomnia. Even on a ‘good’ night I don’t get a great deal of sleep. It makes me upset, bad tempered and irrational. Often I’ll read or come downstairs, eat a bowl of cereal, write. But sometimes the thoughts in my head won’t be still enough to let me do those things. I sleep alone these days too. So I amuse myself with my iPad. (I know, I know, remove all devices from your bedroom if you want a decent sleep……blah blah blah.) Occasionally I indulge in, what I call, insomniac insanity and I use social media to express my disgust and frustration at my sleepless state, the things going round in my head that disturb my equilibrium. I can be uncharacteristically vitriolic. But curiously it helps. Using Twitter, looking at GIFs, letting off steam and I can feel calmer and maybe doze. Then when I wake I generally delete 99% of those tweets. Except I didn’t delete them all yesterday. One got left. It was a self absorbed, self pitying tweet about my lack of self esteem and my self doubt, questioning why I started blogging and whether I should be blogging at all.
I think I received more responses to that tweet than any I’ve ever posted before! I feel quite choked at how caring and concerned everybody is. I believed myself to be invisible. I didn’t think many people read my blog or my tweets. I thought I was on the periphery of the whole thing, an outsider, the kid in the playground with no friends. A blogger who couldn’t engage. I was too old, it’s a younger person’s game. But it seems I was wrong.
I’ve been thinking about blogging a lot. I think it’s only natural when you’re doing the same thing as loads of other people to compare. And I felt my blog paled into insignificance compared to the majority of other blogs. I do still think that. Even though I’ve been doing it for a few years I’ve very few followers, very few comments compared to others who have hundreds of followers and many comments. I always thought that blogs grew gradually, gaining momentum and bloggers progressed. Mine wasn’t. I haven't. So I figured, and I have done for a while, that I’m just not a very good blogger. But people said such lovely things yesterday that I have to rethink that.
I’ve been thinking about things from the wrong angle maybe. I’ve been overthinking too! That was something else that came up in the responses and encouragement I received. But do I try and change my approach? Do I try to write reviews that will appeal to a broader audience? No, I wouldn’t be true to myself if I did that. What I write comes from my heart. I give it my all. I should carry on doing what I do in the way that I do it. I don't think it is that I am a bad reviewer. In fact someone whose opinion I cherish told me I was a 'natural and gifted critic'! Maybe I'm back to my original premise - I'm just a bad blogger.......
Our perceptions of ourselves are often skewed. We don’t see ourselves the way others see us. I’m still very moved by the kind things people said and their concern. I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has posted a message of encouragement and support. It means a great deal.
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