I'm feeling quite anxious about this post. I am opening up in a way that I never have before -- sharing a dark part of myself -- and I hope that I have expressed myself properly. I don't ever like to hurt people, even people I don't really know. I have read and re-read this post to make sure that it will accurately portray what I'm trying to say. I'm still not quite sure, but here goes...
It's hard not to compare yourself to others. It's what we do. Jealousy is the biggest leech that keeps sucking away at your life, and it will only get bigger and bigger. I fear that there is nothing that we can do about it. Absolutely nothing. We are human, and it is what we do. It's easy to tell yourself to be happy with what you have and what you do, but that's not enough. Jealousy will always be at the back of your mind, lingering, waiting. It will never go away. Ever.
The reason I bring this up is because of this post I found on a blog called E Tells Tales. In it, she talks about how there is jealousy in the blogging community, and that bloggers are always wanting a larger readership and more comments -- we "answer to the ticker". She has decided to no longer show how many followers she has, and disable her comments. She wants to set her priorities straight to be with her family -- especially because of something that happened to her in the past -- and I commend her for it. Not many bloggers out there would have the guts to do something like that. In a way, it's too bad: She's got a way with words, and that's probably why she has so many followers -- she's also been blogging since 2009. I literally just found her blog, and I'm disappointed that she's taking away the comments.
What I'm leading up to, is that I have a confession to make to you: I have these jealousy issues. It didn't start with this blog though; this is not my first blog. I have been blogging since 2005, and even then I had jealousy issues with other bloggers. Some of them had amazing stories and photographs, and I was a newbie -- a lot of them had been blogging for quite a while, and had been there since the beginning of that community. But something happened to that community, and now those blogs no longer exist. So, I moved on to the next community, and the next community, until I took a break. I don't know if I felt like I didn't have anything to say, or that I liked the freedom from the pressure to be as good or better than those other blogs, but it was nice.
Then I opened my SHOP, and decided to start another blog to help promote it. Here I am, once again, watching the stats and paying attention to how many followers and comments I get. A lot of my followers I only got from taking part in giveaways on other blogs -- shows you how interested most of them must be. But I have those followers that I so desperately wanted. Don't I?
One of my realisations this year was that everything must happen organically; you can't force anything to happen. I can't force people to follow me on my blog, Facebook, or Twitter, and I certainly can't force them to comment. But as I'm leaving everything alone, I'm noticing that people are starting to find me, and that they are responding to what I have to say. It's difficult, but maybe it will help curb those jealousy issues for a little while.
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