social(media)ly awkward

When I signed up for the A-Z challenge, I was met with a greater challenge than thinking up alphabetical topics: it was a personal challenge – to put myself out there.  The rules were simple: blog about a new topic starting with a different letter every day and encourage traffic to your blog by visiting others, commenting on or liking their blogs.  Being the geek I am, I thought up a theme and drafted every post in no time.  Then I proceeded to the real challenge.

Despite having had a blog in some capacity for the past four years, I never really joined the blogging community.  To be honest, I didn’t know what that meant or even that one existed to such an extent.  I followed four blogs – two of people I knew personally and two that were recommended.   Since taking this challenge and actually exploring blogs I’ve added another three today alone. 

I don’t know what drives others to follow blogs.  Maybe I’m the only person who gets overwhelmed upon entering an existing blog and needs a backstory.  I hardly ever read the current post – I prefer going straight to the author’s ‘about me’ and then to their very first post ever.  I am keen to get to know the author, their reason for blogging, see if they’re someone I could like or whether they’ve said something that resonates with me.  That’s how I chose who to follow. 

Now this has presented another personal challenge: insecurity.  For now I find myself asking what others would think of me, my reasons, my musings, my words and my substance.  Maybe I have thousands of grammatical errors?  Maybe nothing I’ve ever said could be deemed profound. But have I ever sought to be? Oh Lord!

I find myself feeling suddenly vulnerable and inwardly laughing at my audacity to think I had something valuable to say.  I don’t want to be seen as fickle or try hard, nor do I want to be overlooked or disliked.  A challenge indeed! It was so much easier when I just logged on, wrote, posted and logged off again without any more thought than to purge my feelings and hope that somewhere someone felt the same.