The Magic Friend-Maker

Two things. 1. This is not a blog post looking for coddling or fishing for compliments. Really, it's not. It IS a blog post trying to explain blogging to people who don't "get" blogging though. And 2. I have some secrets.

The first secret is this - I am fairly socially awkward.

I can't carry on conversations sometimes. I can't make new friends as well as I'd like. I'm quiet, I'm shy, I'm pretty self-conscious sometimes, and every once in a while I feel like I have nothing worth-while to say. I most definitely am not going to spark an interesting debate or reach out to someone in a public setting.

But the cool thing is my blog kind of does that for me. My blog has proven to be a conversation starter on more than one occasion. People who normally wouldn't come up and start conversations about infertility can. Or people who see me across a room can come up and say, "hey, I saw on your blog that you like to paint! Me too! I like to paint too! Let's be friends!" The blog gives people a reason to get to know me when they normally wouldn't have a reason. I like that. It takes a little social pressure off of me.

My second secret is this... this little space gives me confidence. Once a day, I get this chance to put something into the world that I've spent time on. Something with too many grammar mistakes and strange sentence structures. Something that I care about. And sometimes, shockingly, other people care about it too. For someone who has struggled very much in the past with self-worth (and who is getting better day by day), having 5 or 30 or 50 blog visitors a day is a very, very cool thing.

Some people think that last sentence (and blogging in general) is about ego. Some people do see my blog as egotistical, I suppose. But for me, the few paragraphs a day I send out into the world is not at all about ego, but about telling myself every day that some people do care about me. It's not to stack up compliments onto a healthy confidence, but to build up a foundation where once there was a very unhealthy hole. As pitiful and cheesy as that may sound, it's true.


So thanks, if that's you. Lovely, faithful blog reader. Thanks for helping me get up out-the-hole.