My Blogging Love Affair Rekindled

The good, the bad, and the responsibility

Photo by Cathal Mac an Bheatha on Unsplash

As an introvert at heart, social media is a challenge for me. Small talk is not my forte unless I am in a work environment. But get me engaged in deep thinking and thought-provoking conversations, and you bypass the introvert. I tried Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, but it wasn’t until finding Medium that I began to feel comfortable in the social aspects.

You are a Writer First

The act of writing makes you a writer. Plain and simple. The act of blogging is writing a weblog. An online place to share opinions, knowledge, and experience. The actions of engagement and hopes of finding like-minded followers, sharing and learning with a group of people who enjoy the same thing, yet in a million different ways. Isn’t that the purpose of social media?

Medium feels like coming home to a long-lost friend. I became a paying member at the end of April, and my love for blogging is rekindled.

The Love Affair

I’m an avid journal writer — for decades now. I am an artist. These are the places I have conversations with myself. I listen to the voice within when it is staring me back from the pages. Most recently, that voice started to share memories of my active blogging days. As most love affairs go, you can’t see what you had — good or bad, until you miss something.

You see, I started blogging when Blogger was the place to be. A time when AOL, you’ve got mail, and Prodigy were the buzzwords of the day. I loved the weekly caravans of a blogger. You would show up and follow the others along the path of blogs, and it was like an all you could eat buffet. My first “group” was a blues music fan group on Prodigy.

I had a good run on my last blog from around 2010 to 2014. I had a decent following. I was asked to speak at conferences and got picked to do a blogging stint as a challenge. It was a six-month run of weekly blog posts to the online version of a popular women’s magazine. The experiences with blogging were two-fold — just like the versions of me. Somedays, I felt like a farce. My genre was a daily trigger for me. I continued in hopes of healing that part of me. I wrote in the weight loss, body image genre while I vacillated between the desire and sporadic attempts for health and my unhealthy binge eating patterns. Yes, I wrote about it, but my inner voice called me a fake every day. It was life-altering but not in the way you might imagine. I felt like an imposter with my genre daily triggering me. My shadow walk took over — patterns from my complex PTSD fighting with my healing soul.

My Exit from Blogging

When my husband was first diagnosed with cancer, I wrote a heartfelt post and laid my vulnerability out on my blog table. I used an excerpt from a poem and wrote my own thoughts. A week later, I got an email advising of a copyright violation and demanding money. I was confused. I had cited it and gave credit to the author. I corresponded with the email and was advised what I didn’t do was link back to the author’s webpage-part of the copyright terms. I corrected my error and still received the demand. So, I took down the post but still received the requests for compensation.

Combine this with the daily stress of my husband’s diagnosis, combined with all the fears and worries that go with it; I didn’t have the energy to deal with these demands. Being advised, the only thing I could do was shut down my blog altogether. So, I did. It was a pure act of fight or flight to my stress. Fight for my family and flee from what had been my place of belonging.

The Responsibilities

As online writers, we have a responsibility to our readers. You never know when something you say may trigger another. We also have the responsibility of truth and research. You don’t know until you know. A case in point is copyright. Please read up on it! Dig deep into your favorite sayings and references. In all honesty, I have to admit; I have an editor to thank for this reminder. I wrote a piece, submitted and received it back with lots of notations about cites. I stepped into the realm of phrases like research shows, and it was a technical piece, while in my heart, it was just what I believed and have studied for years. It sent me into a spin for a couple of hours. It left me thinking — maybe this love affair isn’t meant to be. The conclusion — yes, it is a love affair for me. In all love matters, you have to adjust and learn about the other one involved. That is my responsibility in this affair.

I took time to get to know more about Medium as my partner in this journey. This post, by Casey Botticello at Blogging Guide, explaining the history of Medium, showed me the signs of growth and changes with the participants on the platform. It lined up with a lot of my own history with blogging.

So, thank you. Thank you to the founders, the editors, the publications, and all the writers. The hard work and the love you dedicate to this platform are not unnoticed by me. Social media is here to stay. But, the initial underlying purpose of Medium is what will keep me learning. It’s the balance. As I read, its creation was a place to balance short tweets (small talk) and long journalism — a weblog for the masses. It plants seeds for the voices of society as a whole. I, for one, want to be a part of that conversation.