Category — Blogoversary

Four years ago, Josh told me to find a new outlet for the feelings I was sharing with him (always beginning at 11 p.m.) and a blog was born.

It is my four-year blogoversary.

I usually like to take this post to reflect on the year and look ahead.  In the early years, the growth and change was remarkable, with dozens of new projects popping up monthly.  Now, the blog is more like a four-year-old–still learning and moving forward, but more consistent.  It sleeps from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.  It has mastered the toilet.  By which I mean that we’re nearing the 300th Roundup and I’m still writing a response every time Salon tackles the topic of infertility.

Two years ago, I started giving each year a single word to use as a goal. The overall word defining my blog is “community.” But then each year received a word that defined the overarching theme for the year:

• Year One: Connections
• Year Two: Action
• Year Three: Listening
• Year Four: Tune

You can read the lengthy description of how I interpreted “tune,” but at its core, I stated, “delurking is more for the writer to know who is reading her blog than it is for the silent person to speak their mind. So my point is not to get people delurking. My point is to get more points-of-view heard.”  And hopefully I did that, perhaps not on the grandest level, but in a minute way.

I then usually give one more word, looking ahead, to help focus me during the upcoming year.  And this year, my word is “own.”

This will be my first full year of self-hosting, so that obviously plays into the word “own,” but the idea is much larger than that.  I think we need to own our words, own our actions, both when we’re proud of them and when we’re remorseful.  I think we need to own our place in community–look at which niche of the ALI community we’re standing in and look at ways to improve our interactions with fellow bloggers.  I think those crazy kids in Rent were on to something when they implied the difference between renting and owning in their opening number.

I feel like this fourth year, I am more rooted, this blog feels sturdier.  The stability affords me the ability to take chances.  Expect more visual mediums this year such as photograph and video since I now own the equipment.  And expect that very little will change.  The Creme de la Creme will roll around again next winter, the Roundup will continue to be posted on Fridays, and I will continue to try to convince you that there is nothing wrong with 70-year-olds having babies.

I need to thank two entities: my blog and you.

To my blog, thank you for being here for four years.  You are my white space, my blank canvas, the receptacle for my ideas.  You have given me my work and my friends.  You have given me opportunities I never thought would be mine to have.  I love you, little blog.

To you, thank you for listening to me.  Thank you for wiping my virtual tears.  Thank you for allowing me to blow my nose on your virtual sleeve.  Thank you for laughing at my jokes (even if you were just pitying me and it was a fake laugh).  Thank you for linking to me and participating in my projects and for reading me and for hugging me when we meet in the face-to-face world.  I get very teary when I talk about the friends I have made through my blog because just as I never imagined the opportunities that would come my way from writing in this space, I never knew that I would meet such a diverse, interesting, beautiful, wonderful group of people.  Thank you for being here, for reaching out, for hugging back.  As I have said before, “A good hug is like finding an unopened pack of m&ms in your purse right before a movie begins.”  And you guys are the m&ms in the purse.

I know Andy Samberg and T-Pain have got a motherfucking boat, but I have a blog, I have a blog, take a good hard look at the motherfucking blog. Er…and by motherfucking, I don’t actually mean “mother” fucking since our sex does not actually result in parenthood…hence that whole problem with the mother connection…er…

But what better way is there to celebrate the eve before the eve of my third blogoversary than by writing a post that is sure to elicit several emails asking me why I feel the need to use such foul language. Honestly, Melissa.

Happy third blogoversary to me–I’m having a virtual gluttony of blogger loving this week between seeing Chez Perky, Family Beginnings, Baby Smiling in Back Seat, and A Little Pregnant. It’s just like candles in a cake…with one to grow on.

Get your towels ready, it’s about to go down…

I promised that the whole delurking thing would become clear but I feel like it will be a huge disappointment now to discover that the dog feces and ice cream questions were inadvertently placed next to each other and are unrelated. While I’m glad that almost everyone is willing to slap on some latex gloves and root around in a dog’s excrement, the ice cream question was just a throw away–I was trying to make it simple for people to delurk who didn’t want to think too hard about a dog’s anus. The Weekly What If is always there and then, on top of that, I was asking for people to delurk too. But all of this needs a larger explanation. We’ll start here:

It’s my blogoversary this week.

It comes around every year, doesn’t it? And while, yes, it isn’t until Thursday of this week (I started this blog on June 25, 2006), having Show and Tell go up on Wednesday night leaves me with a conundrum–either post early and not have the blogoversary day be special or post late and miss my blogoversary. So I hope you’ll indulge me on my third anniversary in celebrating it now, within this post, and with my Show and Tell this week.

I like to make my blogoversary a big deal. If it were realistic to set off fireworks, I would, environment be damned. I would ride elephants through the streets, tossing sapphire necklaces to everyone in the crowd. I would commission Cirque du Soliel to create a performance art piece called Le Blog with acrobats hanging from ropes constructed out of old posts.

But barring all that, I’ll just reflect on the past year and set a goal for the future one.

First and foremost, my blog visually got a revamp this year, making it more user-friendly. Actually, a lot of things got a revamp including the Lost and Found and the blogroll. The forums were started, giving people an extra space to post and reach out of the community when they didn’t want to use their blog. We started Bridges, which never quite took off and started doing collective Kirtsying instead to get our stories out to the general public on the front page of the social media site.

It wasn’t really a year of starting new things because, as I stated last year, my focus was on listening. Instead, projects continued. IComLeavWe happened every month, Show and Tell happened every week, Barren Advice continued whenever there were questions to answer. The Blogging Name Registry to mark the two year milestone kept adding names, the collective Shop Mom or Pop went through another holiday season, and the Creme de la Creme rolled around again. We kept meeting at the Virtual Lushary each month. The Barren Bitches read a lot of books. Entries were added to Operation Heads Up. Every week, I continued to pull together the Roundup.

It was a busy year of hearing words and then figuring out how to get them out to the general public. Because it is one thing to preach to the choir–it certainly makes a person feel less alone to hear that someone else is going through similar emotions–but it is also important to get those words out to other people. I am sad that I couldn’t keep Bridges afloat, but I think the community Kirtsying (and everyone should participate with that and submit great posts) fills the same goal. I hope to keep that growing and expanding, doing everything I can to get our words out there to people who need to hear them (either because they need to find this community or because they need their eyes opened).

Last year, I started giving each year a single word to use as a goal. The overall word defining my blog is “community.” But then each year received a word that defined the overarching theme for the year:

• Year One: Connections
• Year Two: Action
• Year Three: Listening

I think I did a decent job listening this year. I wrote about this idea of setting forth a guide word:

My defining term from now until next June is “listen.” It’s a hard thing to do–to truly listen to another person. To set aside the time to concentrate on someone else’s thoughts without simultaneously considering your own. To practice a form of verbal relativism, listening while trying to place yourself in the other person’s point of view rather than your own. Talking is easy. I have about 850 posts on this blog. Being silent. Reading. Actually hearing; internalizing someone else’s words, tossing them around inside your head, allowing them to change your world. That is hard.

So I did a lot of reading this year. A lot of commenting via IComLeavWe. A lot of hearing and sending forth the words I was hearing. So I do think it was helpful to set a guiding word. We’ll see how successful I am at following this year’s word.

Oh…you want to know what it is?

• Year Four: Tune

Tune is obviously a word with multiple meanings. Tune can be a “pleasing succession of musical tones” which I think is a term that speaks largely of community. I want the people I interact with in tune with one another. Which does not mean that every song needs to be a syrupy waltz–even DC hardcore punk songs sometimes have a tune–but that X leads to Y leads to Z. In blogging terms, keeping a tune would mean setting a blogging standard of courtesy so the song continues. There have been too many times that people have stepped away from community because they don’t feel welcome or are harassed. And finding a tune means agreeing to both our role as a contributor and a taker from community. I think this code of standards can be set over time with multiple contributors–a huge group project–but I do think that having a list of standards, a list of what we’ll accept or rail against–is important.

Tuning can also refer to an adjustment. I think projects will continue to be fine-tuned and streamlined to be more user-friendly. I can get pretty stuck in rut and not want to change things out of fear of change. But I do think that it is a good thing to keep tinkering with existing projects, making them better, rather than solely starting new ones. I am considering (gasp!) self-hosting in order to take advantage of more software out there. But adjustments in baby steps…

Lastly, the thing I want the most for this upcoming year in terms of “tune” is to give sound to the silent. I think we often times focus on the musical piece (the blog post) or even the music critics (the commenters) that write about the performance, but my thought is on how
to bring those in the audience–those who are listening and thinking and internally reacting–into the conversation.

I asked people to delurk last Friday. 2161 people “read” the post (it’s impossible to know how many people actually scanned their eyes over the content, but 2161 clicked on the blog that day). Even if we said only 1000 people read it, it still is interesting to look at the fact that 86 people left a comment. The majority of those were people who have commented in the past. A small handful were people who delurked for the first time. So about 1 in 25 people left a note.

I have been thinking about those 24 out of 25 ever since Lori from Weebles Wobblog pointed out the silent majority of blog readers during an email exchange. And by silent, I am taking into account a multitude of ways to get your voice heard from leaving a comment to writing your own post to sending an email…speaking your mind at all. Look at your own stats–I’m sure that you’ll see that you have many more readers/subscribers than people you know reading your blog.

Which is not a problem on one hand–I mean, there has been a fine tradition of blog lurking and I am just as guilty as the next person of reading and running (there are people who probably have no clue that I’ve read every word they’ve written…creepy)–but is on the group project end of things. When we’re talking about community and we’re presenting voices from community, it’s hard to know that such a large portion of people are silent.

Plus, delurking is more for the writer to know who is reading her blog than it is for the silent person to speak their mind. So my point is not to get people delurking. My point is to get more points-of-view heard.

So many people start their email when adding themselves to the blogroll: “I’ve been a lurker for years and I’ve finally been inspired to start my own.” Which, of course, is fantastic, but what about all of the people who don’t have the time or inclination to start their own blog. I think there have been projects in the past–100 Words and the Blilts–that helped bring in new voices. And I am playing with more ideas that will unfold during the year to bring in more of the silent voices.

What would be most helpful? I would love to hear your ideas/reaction to the concept of ensuring more people have a voice without having to do a lot of work on their own end as well as hearing from those who are blogless on what they would like to see happen to ensure that they are a recorded member of the community–noted, known, and while still blogless, with an important voice.

The first step I’ve taken is to include a new feature on the blog. If you look up at the navigation bar at the top of the blog, you will see a little crown towards the right side with the words “Your Thoughts.” It is a place to leave private comments. The only person who can see them is me. My wish, if you don’t feel comfortable leaving a comment even anonymously on the blog, is that you’ll use this feature to speak your mind. Politely, respectfully, not use it as a space for hate, but it is a private space. I may ask you if I could share your words anonymously within a blog post, but I will never use what is respectfully written in that space without permission.

Technically, it could even be used to submit a short blog post that I could upload on the Annex and Kirtsy in order to get out a point-of-view. But I think it is a valuable place to speak your mind when you don’t want to leave it as a public comment.

So, tune. And all the incarnations of the word “tune.” It will be interesting to see how many people we can bring into the harmony and make sure the silent ones are noted and as important as those who of us who like to talk and talk and talk and fill up the blogosphere with hundreds of posts per year.

Happy anniversary, little blog. You continue to be this huge source of comfort for me and I often jump to you mentally. I am so glad I started you, so glad I continued you, so glad that I’ve met so many amazing people through this space, been affected by their story as they have been affected by mine. I am so proud of the work we all do to take the stigma out of infertility, adoption, and loss. I am grateful to be a member of the ALI community. Thank you for joining in this enormous, three-year-long version of Kumbaya.

I need to explain this with something that will sound as if it should be set to violin music (with perhaps a slow-mo closeup of a single tear rolling down my cheek), but I never had enough friends growing up. Do you know what I mean by that? I’ve had friends at every stage of life–I was never popular (in fact, I am quite certain that few people from high school remember me and the proof is in the number of people who stared at me quizzically at reunion, their head cocked to the side as they said, “we were really in physics together? We were lab partners?”) but I wasn’t unpopular. When I got to college and I heard about other people’s middle school or high school years, I realized I got off pretty easy in comparison. But just because I had friends–and good friends at that–I never felt as if I had enough friends.

I am greedy like that.

It’s that feeling you get when you sit down to eat, fully expecting to be satiated by the end of the meal, especially when you see the amount of food at your disposal. But you walk away from the table with this gnawing hunger still present. And what is it? A failure of my own body to not recognize that there is food in my stomach? A true need unfulfilled? How do you know if it’s something wrong with you or something truly missing?

The same could be said for my heart. I had friends and I obviously connected with people and loved many. I’ve never consciously known what was missing or looked for it (or, more accurately, known how to look for it). It was always this small emptiness, a tiny gap of air in the heart. In my mind, I imagined everyone I love squeezed into atriums and ventricles, bodies locked against each other as I carried them inside my chest. And somewhere, free-floating through that mass of love, a tiny space. A pocket of emptiness. And absence searching for a presence.

And I realized as I read those blogoversary comments that it’s gone. The little bubble is gone.

I drove around for an hour and twenty minutes this morning, misled by Google maps and a mislabeled street. I stopped for directions four times, each time being sent farther and farther from my destination until, after the start time of the concert, a man outside of Blockbuster video informed me that I was “miles and miles away, man.” We turned around and headed home.

In the hour and twenty minutes, I tossed around this thought in my head: what you took notice of, it is all part of carrying that bubble for so long. I am so acutely aware of what it feels like when your heart isn’t full. I never want anyone to feel that way when there is something so simple we can do: reach out and show care and remove the small empty spaces that collect inside the heart.

Everyone deserves to be full.

Ah, fuck, you already knew my kumbaya-ness. And now, there is my period to contend with as well. Thank you. I will never be able to put into words how much those comments meant to me.

My blogoversary, my blogoversary, ferns, dancing, tons of people. Every pink flower west of the Mississippi. Blogoversary cake in the dining room and the NaComLeavMo cake… Hidden in the carport.

Wait.

Shit.

That was Shelby’s wedding. And this in my blogoversary. I get these two occasions mixed up. All. The. Time.

My blogoversary is not bathed in blush or bashful, but my blog is two years old today. It is also almost the anniversary of my little planner and I am still lugging it around with me a year later. But it should get its own day to shine.

It is hard to remember what was started this year and what was merely a continuation. Show and Tell is definitely new as is IComLeavWe (which was called NaComLeavMo in its first incarnation). U.T.E.R.U.S. was started and we did our first big fundraising adventure. I kicked off the weekly Barren Advice column and a bunch of us have already chosen our new blogging names and added them to the Blogging Name Registry to mark the two year milestone. The collective Shop Mom or Pop was started last winter. The Public Living Room was utilized for online meetings and simultaneous television watching. Twelve and a Half Fighting Back took on activism projects. We had an international candy exchange. The largest project–Lost and Found and Connections Abound (LFCA or L & F)–not only began but got so large that it moved into its new space and has published almost 200 entries so far.

Other projects simply continued. The blogroll grew like a weed. The Creme de la Creme rolled around again as well as the Roundup Extravaganza. We kept meeting at the Virtual Lushary each month. The Barren Bitches read a lot of books. Entries were added to Operation Heads Up and new people volunteered for the Peer Counselor List. Secret Ode Days popped up out of nowhere.

I looked at the two years this blog has been in existence and used their overarching themes to determine the course this blog will take in its third year. This is different from the word that defines the entire blog which is “community.” I think that word best describes the blog as a whole if it had to be boiled down to one word.

But, if you take each year on its own, the first year was best defined by the word “connections.” I started the blog because I had always wanted a single space on the Internet that combined all the best aspects of the individual spaces. The information from the medical sites and the support from the bulletin boards and the fun projects from…well…camp. The connections were sometimes between two people or sometimes between a person and information. But so many of those early projects were about removing the isolation inherent in infertility. If you had an Internet connection, you had a community, not just a blog. I did this for myself, but I’m happy if it helped others too.

The word that defined the second year was “action.” I have a definite antsy side to my personality. I don’t sleep a lot. I don’t remain still for very long. I don’t like to talk about things–I like to see things happen. I live my entire life by Gandhi’s adage “be the change you wish to see in the world” (albeit at a high speed with the theme word being “now”). So we changed things. We saw needs and we filled them. We fought the good fight. We made sure–to the best of our abilities–that more people got the support they needed. Thank you for this.

I am never sure what word defines the year until after it is over, but I’m entering this year with a single word to help guide me. I don’t know if it is helpful or not to name it right now, but I’m going to place it out there as a thought. My defining term from now until next June is “listen.” It’s a hard thing to do–to truly listen to another person. To set aside the time to concentrate on someone else’s thoughts without simultaneously considering your own. To practice a form of verbal relativism, listening while trying to place yourself in the other person’s point of view rather than your own. Talking is easy. I have about 850 posts on this blog. Being silent. Reading. Actually hearing; internalizing someone else’s words, tossing them around inside your head, allowing them to change your world. That is hard.

Already, the small projects that have planted seeds in year two are sprouting into year three. Show & Tell at its core is about listening to what is important to another person. Lost & Found is about sitting with someone’s words and letting them know that you’re listening and supporting them.

The thing that I have the most hope wrapped around is IComLeavWe. I would love for this idea to build and for comments to gather the same respect as blog posts. We honour blog posts all the time, but how many times do we honour comments? We lament not being able to post enough, but how many times do people also consider their lack of commenting? NaComLeavMo was admittedly hard. It became suffocatingly difficult to remember to comment a quota every single day for a full month. I hope that by making it weekly and making it often that people will drop in and out with an eye to what is happening in their own life. When the list opens next week on Tuesday, I hope people add themselves. When IComLeavWe rolls around (each month from the 21st to the 28th), I hope we see a huge spike in comments. Thoughtful comments. Comforting comments. And also…

Even when you don’t have something to add, when you can’t find the words to respond, I hope this year that it becomes socially acceptable and understood to simply write the phrase “I am listening” and post the comment under your name. What does this do? Sometimes, it helps to know that your words were read. That someone didn’t click on and click off of your blog without processing your words. Sometimes it simply feels good to know that you’re not alone, even if the other person doesn’t have a solution or deep comfort. Some people may think this is lazy; a comment not worth the effort to leave or receive. But I think it can be very powerful to know that someone listened even if they have nothing to respond with in return. If all comments ran this course, I would need to rethink my stance on this, but right now, amid the other thoughts, I would love to hear the small “I am listenings;” especially on
a post that you see does not have a lot of comments.

So happy anniversary, little blog. May this next year be one of deep listening, good community, enormous love, wonderful news, and only more kumbayaness. We cannot control so many things in our lives–the enormity of what we can’t do sometimes leaves me speechless–but ensuring that no one feels alone: that is actually within our power. So it is my goal: to make sure that anyone I encounter knows that I have listened.