Up: [[Sharing]] Created: 2024-06-29 I had a blog for three years. Before I started it, I researched as is my wont. Perfectionism reared its ugly head. I wanted to do everything exactly right so I spent hours/days/weeks and a bunch of money digging into SEO, the various styles of posts, how to build an audience. That wasn’t fun, it made me really anxious because while I lived a very extroverted life, in retirement I was finally going to have the chance to go within and yet here I was digging into all the ways I could have fame and fortune in the online world. I hadn’t wanted either but got swept into the chase after reading dozens of posts by kids in their 20s who think they've conquered the world. The next step was fun for me. I LOVE design so I hired a web designer, paid him a lot of money and had him design a customized site for me and a logo. No ‘out of the box’, just start writing for me! This is a problem I’ve had my whole life. I have what my dad called a ‘turnkey mentality’ — I’ve got to research the entire field and have everything perfect before I launch. Did that, then started writing posts. I’d retired a year or so earlier because of burnout. A large part of my burnout came from the belief that I had no value unless I was making a contribution. Being from the ‘go big or go home’ school of thought, the contribution always had to be huge. I was still three years away from starting into a Jungian analysis so nothing was making sense to me. I really didn’t know myself at all because I had thrown myself into my work, spending 12-18 hours a day at it from the time I was a kid in school. So my thought was that I’d use the blog to come up with an idea for writing another book, but it couldn’t be a book about education (I was done with that) and I had no idea what I could write about since I didn’t know anything else. This resulted in three years of weekly (and during A-Z challenges, daily) blog posts that were informational - heavily researched, carefully written, completely impersonal. I did improve over time, getting a tiny bit more personal but I wasn’t willing to show any vulnerabilities (still struggle with that) so my audience never grew beyond a few hundred people. It wasn’t all bad. I met a couple of women who became good friends, one of them the ‘Joanne’ that I talk with twice a week and go on retreats with a few times a year. If I hadn’t blogged, I’d never have met her. But what was mostly happening is what usually happens — bloggers are read by other bloggers and it becomes a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ scenario. I subscribed to every blogger who subscribed to me. Every time someone left a comment, I’d not only give a full response but I’d feel obligated to write a comment on their blog too. Between the researching, writing, posting, commenting, reading, I turned my blog into a more than full time job while still being no closer to feeling that I was making a worthy contribution to anyone. When I started analysis and learned of the importance of a well-sealed alchemical container for the work, I wrote a post saying that, like a theatre, I was ‘going dark’ and didn’t know when or if I’d be back. I kept the blog online, without writing another word, for a few years until I eventually got fed up with the daily emails I was receiving from people who had obviously never read my blog, but were asking to guest post and do cross-linking promotions with me. I took it offline. So that’s why the no comments, no audience building, no tracking of traffic, no SEO is appealing to me. It lowers the bar. And if I can share whatever from my vault that isn’t too personal, then I’m not writing specifically for an audience and trying to make it perfect, but knowing there is an audience might still give me the impetus to make sure the note has sufficient context, is in my own words, and links usefully to other notes. If I end up doing this, I’d include my email so that conversations can happen and I would absolutely enjoy that.