Bye Blogs (Yours, Not Mine)
Today I realized, or else this was been simmering unconsciously for awhile and chose today to burst into conscious thought, that there is a tension in me wherein because I myself blog, it’s somehow implicitly incumbent upon me to read lots of other bloggers, yet I just can’t seem to fit that into my attentional load. This tension manifests as feeling bad for myself when I try, because hitting this attentional resource limit is cognitively claustrophobic, but then also as feeling bad about myself when I fail, because not meeting that sense of implicit incumbency is ridden with guilt.
Everything I’ve ever written here about blogging, and I’ve written a lot, is true or remains something I believe.
It’s just that I don’t know how to keep abreast of gestures at everything, read interesting articles on nature and science, escape into both a fiction book and a nonfiction book every day, use social media to get a wide-ranging glimpse of a variety of things and people, and then also read dozens of other people’s blogs, even as I continue to flail over whether or not anyone reads mine and why do I even care about that and why can’t I seem to stop caring about that.
This afternoon, I once again jettisoned most blogs from my feed reader, which now contains mostly news media, science and nature magazines and websites, some baseball stuff, and a couple handfuls of newsletters. In the tension of it all, this makes me feel both good and bad at one and the same time.
Is this just an effect of gestures at everything? In a saner environment would I feel more capable of reading other people in the form that I can’t help but write myself? Or am I just not capable of this at all? If it helps, technically I also have an enormous backlog of those nature and science articles that I’ve been saving for months and just can’t seem to find the attentional window to read.
This is where I am. I don’t like it. Despite my day-to-day life being more or less consistent lately in the sense of hitting that “meh” middle path where things don’t get too far up but also don’t get too far down, which for years now has been my goal to maintain, I still feel just underscored by an inability to adequately plug into things in a way that’s commensurate with the flail I feel about whether or not people are plugging into me.
I’ve lost the thread of this post, just like that.
Time to leave it be.