My wonderful, much-loved blog

I didn’t forget to do Fashion Friday yesterday. I was just too tired. I fell asleep quite early, and woke up at 1am to find myself lying down on the couch, my phone somewhere under me, still in the Doctor Who shirt I had worn to work.

I have noticed that I get headaches when I sleep in. I usually sleep in on the weekends but I despise waking up after 10am. It’s almost criminal for me. I can’t really feel much guilt when I’ve been waking up really early for work, though. Sometimes you need a sleep-in on Saturday morning.

I’m used to waking at 6am, but it’s not something my body can take long-term if I’m not sleeping by midnight. I definitely knock back and forth when it comes to sleeping, and I’ve decided that I hate being a night owl and love watching the sun rise… but after a bit of thought, I think sometimes I love both the day and the night. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I have to make sure I get my sleep.

Last week I said I would be trying to do Fashion Friday every Friday, doing some non-outfit posts every other week. When I woke up and realised I missed Friday, I just thought, “Ah, oh well. That’s alright.” I had read Manda’s post yesterday about how blogging is her hobby, not her job, and recalled the times I felt like my blog had turned into a chore.

A few years ago, I ran a tutorial website, chock-full of WordPress tutorials, HTML tutorials, and tutorials on how to use certain scripts. I made pixel art graphics that people admired. I then worked my way into making other graphics. I made WordPress themes because people demanded them. I made really ugly textures and patterns because everyone else was doing it. I wrote blog posts that had questions for the readers to answer, just to make lots of people leave comments. I looked at my stats a lot, and checked if I had received more comments or followers. I reviewed websites. I wrote three hundred reviews in a year, one being 10,000 words long. I analysed people’s websites when I reviewed them, criticised them, tried to be funny, and was sometimes just really mean. It was what people wanted.

I had twenty websites at one point, each for a different purpose. I separated my poetry from my blog and my avatar creations from my fanlistings, making so many blogs for various purposes because they didn’t feel “right” being in the one place. The rise of social media made it easier to promote, and thus made blogging a less fun activity. Things like Tumblr took over, as well as other platforms that made it easy to share things. Then I would get caught up in the reblogs, likes, favourites, followers…

It honestly took a lot of guts to pretty much stop giving a fuck. Having a lot of followers on Tumblr didn’t mean half as much as the awesome people I had met while blogging. Getting comments on my blog posts that were just endless replies was also nothing, compared to the really insightful comments I get on my posts now. Why did I care about Google Analytics. Why did it matter that I got 300 unique hits a day. It was nothing I wanted to brag about compared to how much I like writing. I’ll forever be proud to say I love writing, but there will never be a valid reason to tell people that I get a certain amount of hits.

Admittedly, working as a web developer for several clients and now working on one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world has made me revert to thinking about stats and growth.

But not for my blog. When I moved from Heartdrops.org to Hey Georgie, I stopped writing tutorials just for people. I stopped caring as much about the number of comments on my blog. I stopped bothering to look at statistics. I don’t write things for anyone, or to get more hits or become more popular or liked by people. I write because I love to write.

I love my blog to pieces. Every flaw in my old pieces of writing, every over-emotional bit of poetry, every idiotic hate comment that I may have kept or deleted, every post with overused emoticons from 2009, embarrassing things I might have written, really lame exclamations that sound so unlike me, super-long posts that people probably TLDR’d, screenshots of ugly designs I used to make, amusing tutorials, posts that people liked, hated, commented on. I may have failed in some parts, but there is no denying that I have always loved my blog.

When I meet people, one of the first things they’ll know about me is that I love to write, and that I blog. When people ask me, “What do you blog about?”, I hesitate, because I know they’re thinking I have a travel blog, or a fashion blog, or I review things… the look of confusion when I say “anything… it’s a personal blog I guess” is always a tad more than irritating.

Next time, I’ll answer with, “Whatever I want.”