Ok, Fanagans. I told you that I would tell you the truth about myself, good or bad. Today I don’t have good or bad news. It just is what it is. I’ve had a few friends tell me that I sound like I’m going into hypomania on my blog, and these are the kind of friends that I trust. I feel that they could be onto something, but at the same time, I also see the flip side of the coin. Because I trust my friends enough to know that they’re probably right doesn’t mean that my story isn’t emotionally valid. Feeling both sides of the equation doesn’t give me the perspective that it does to others, so I just thought I would take a minute and address what’s going on.
First of all, Dana and I are struggling financially. This is important if you’re thinking about giving the web site a donation, but not in the grand scheme of things. I’m not saying anything one way or another, it just is. Because we’re struggling financially and I don’t have a job, I don’t feel productive when I’m not writing. The impulse to take care of Dana and to get noticed as fast as possible has very little to do with my current state and everything to do with feeling panicky about how to make ends meet. Publishing comes from my drive to show everyone that I’m worth their time. I have the experience.
I have been involved with writing and coding for the web since I was 19 years old. The first time I put up a web page, it was to impress my first love, Meagan. I don’t think she gave a rat’s ass that I did the web site, but it did give me a marketable skill. There wasn’t a single class that I flunked at University of Houston, because every time I thought I was going to get an F, I offered to make the professor a web site. It worked every time.
Or, at least, it did back then. Now there are content management systems as easy to use as Microsoft Office. Back then, though, you couldn’t just type. You had to know your strong from your em (Webmasters HOLLA!). I learned everything I could get my hands on, because the Internet was a way for me to communicate.
I am an introvert. I have always been an introvert. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to spend time with you, but it doesn’t add energy to my mood. It drains me. Extroverts have extra energy in public and have trouble reflecting in private. I’m reading this great book, Introvert Power, and it’s teaching me all sorts of stuff that I didn’t know about myself before. For instance, I didn’t know that I didn’t want time without people, I need it to function in the world.
This blog has provided me with a way to dream bigger than I ever have before, because the way the publication cycle goes, I can work anywhere and everywhere. The drawback to this enormous job is that I don’t get paid… but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. There are women all over the world that support a partner and kids off of a blog like mine. I need a solid body of work before the web site can sustain on its own. I am the restaurant owner watching his kitchen a hundred hours a week.
Part of me is manic, and part of it is the web itself. In a 24-hour news cycle, you have to move fast to keep up. Why do I post the amount of times that I do in a day? Blogs are connected with something called a ping. A ping is a notification that a blog has updated. As you can imagine, people that use RSS readers or similar aggregators get thousands and thousands of notifications every week. In order to stand out, you have to make your blog appear in someone’s feed more often. My Facebook profile is connected to my WordPress account, so it posts a notification in your news feed the time the server added it, not the time I wrote it.
It’s kind of like wanting attention from David Sedaris and knowing you’re in the top balcony. You have as much to say to him as the people on the front row, but he would never hear you unless you jumped up and down and screamed his name (I know because I did this).
Activating the ping to go off or the Facebook notification to appear is the equivalent of jumping up and down, hoping that somebody sees you. I am driven and passionate about making this web site succeed, and it comes across as hypomania because of the way I juggle the production.
I generally only write for three hours a day, longer on Fridays and Saturdays because those are Dana’s long nights at work. However, I publish all the time because I have an automated job that posts them for me when I’m not at my computer. I also have Pidgin Messenger, so if it looks like I’m on Facebook all the time, I’m really not. It just means that my computer doesn’t have a screensaver so Pidgin won’t tell you I’m away.
I’m not saying there’s not a problem, but I think it is minimal at best. The biggest thing that this burst of creativity is giving me is a sense of purpose and direction toward the life I want instead of the life I currently have. I have to believe that one day, I’ll be a household name. I’ll be a question on Jeopardy! You know what gives me the courage to keep going toward my dream? The fact that I already write to almost every country in the world. The only continent I haven’t touched is Antarctica.
I will slow down when I either have a stable of writers to pool the work, or a charming and very rich patron (that was a joke).
Stories That Are All True 