It happens every year. I look forward to BlogHer all year, then the week before the conference I'm nearly giddy with excitement, then the day finally arrives -- hurrah! -- and I'm off, soon to be standing in the hotel lobby already greeting friends before I even get checked in. Then the days of the actual conference speed by in a blur of love and community, and I come home buoyed by the fellowship of my fellow bloggers.
Then, the sadness creeps in. I'm chronically infected with what I like to call "post event syndrome" where I feel sad and a bit empty after the event is over. This year it was worsened by getting my period during the conference and coming home to my migraine week, and having four days with bad migraines in a row.
But now that it's all settled down, I can begin to actually sort out my feelings. It turns out they are more complex than I realized.
Blogging has changed, drastically, since I started. For instance, in 2004 there was no Twitter. And no Facebook. Web 2.0, and social media, was mostly focused on blogs, message boards, and list serves. Being at heart a geek -- particularly a social media geek -- I embraced each of these technologies as they came up (okay, so Sarah joined Twitter six months before I did, whatEVER) and it has changed, well, everything about how I operate online.
I am a full-on citizen of real time internet -- meaning the instant gratification that comes from communicating on Twitter and Facebook. Blogging, oddly, has become the "slow" social media medium. It takes days to get responses to a post, lots of time emailing the folks that comment back. Frankly, it's clear to me now that I have forsaken responding to comments here because my other forms of community and communication have overtaken my blog communications. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
It's not just the real-time internet that has changed my online community. It's what blogging is about that is changing too. For instance, over here is my friend Mindi's blog. Mindi is a lovely person, someone I get to see a few times a year, and someone that has a very smart business sense. If you look at her blog, you will see that it is jam-packed with useful information, particularly if you are a coupon person (I am not, but that's a whole other post too). But other than both having a page on the internet that uses the blog format, we could not have less in common as writers and as producers of online content. In general, as time marches on in the blogosphere (at a slightly higher speed than anywhere else), there are far more new bloggers like Mindi than there are like me. And by me, I mean "old school" memoir-in-progress style bloggers, bloggers that bare their souls in a highly detailed and personal way. Generally (and I'm being very, very broad in my generalizations), most of the newer bloggers keep the details about their lives very close to the vest, usually for a multitude of reasons: a different expectation of privacy than I personally have, the desire to keep many of their opinions (such as political ones) off their blog so as to make themselves attractive to large brands, and because, simply, their blogs are NOT about them as much as they are about business.
For me, my blog is my business, and my blog is about my life. Which, when you think about it, is pretty fucking weird, actually.
In general, I (hopefully) have been welcoming to newer bloggers, particularly on Twitter. I have relationships with most of them, and I think what they are doing is very smart, business-wise, whereas my personal path to success has been more accidental than, you know, an actual plan. I mean, I didn't PLAN to lose the boys, or get attacked for it -- and both of those events are what made this blog as popular as it is. I do believe, however, that my content is what as made people KEEP coming back, long after those tragedies have passed.
At BlogHer this year, the increased popularity of the new bloggers was evident in a million ways -- the way the Expo Hall vendors approached bloggers, to the off-site brand events, and to the low attendance at the BlogHer sessions themselves. This year, in fact, some large brands were so sure of the lack of interest in actual BlogHer events that they scheduled their events during BlogHer sessions (which pisses me off, frankly). What was less obvious at the time, but is now -- is that bloggers like me don't really have a hand in this poker game.
The reasons I'm approached by brands now -- and get opportunities like the party I worked on Thursday night before the conference -- is more about my large presence on Twitter, and less about the content that I sweat blood and bullets to put up here. For me, writing -- and yes, I do consider blogging WRITING -- is the professional love of my life. I don't mean to sound as if the new bloggers DON'T sweat blood and bullets to get their posts up -- I'm sure they do, and I know that they face an issue of competitiveness I've never had to deal with. What I mean, though, is that for me? It's all about the words and the emotions and the heart.
I think -- deep breath here -- that I've forgotten that fact.
I've written here recently, over and over, about how difficult it is for me to "transition" into being this new kind of blogger, how challenging it is to balance the brand-related work with the content-work of this blog. I realize, now, that the problem is this: I don't actually WANT TO DO THAT. What I want to focus on, first and foremost, is my words.
...
The Wednesday night before BlogHer started, when I was at the Broadway show of West Side Story, they had a young boy come out to sing "Somewhere, a place for us..." I was sitting next to Ellie, two rows back from Deb and Lora, and I felt my heart expand as I contemplated BlogHer and how, here, in New York City, I was at my "place" as a blogger. We were all there, a full community of women that blog. I actually cried a little bit thinking about it. No, really.
But this year, as awesome as it was, BlogHer was not quite the place for me. Even though everyone greeted me with love and joy, I realized as time passed that the style of blogging I do and the bloggers that I have come to love and respect so much over these six years are now kind of the minority as bloggers. I don't feel bitter about that, or like it is bad or wrong: it just is.
I was lucky enough to get to share a small bus home from New York City with a bunch of local Philadelphia bloggers, and we talked a bit about this on the way home. One blogger, Shannon, hard at work the whole way home with her portable internet connection, said, "I think of you as more of a personality, like Oprah." Which, of course, is incredibly flattering -- who doesn't want to be compared to the most successful woman in history?
But, of course, I'm not just a personality. I'm, well, me. The way I am online is the way I am. What I really want to be known for -- and what I was mostly known for at my first BlogHer convention two years ago -- is being a WRITER.
Yes, I am a writer. It's time for me to remember that: I AM A WRITER.
Oh! Joy and rapture! To remember my purpose, and to once again feel that charge of energy when I know where I want to expend my energies. I'm going to find my book proposal -- the one I was supposed to finish up before BlogHer this year -- and start polishing it up. I'm going to start replying to comments again, because you are all my very first community online, whether or not we see each other at blogger conferences.
So: this long-drawn-out-hot-mess-of-a-post is old school Cecily: working out my thoughts. That's what I do. I think on the page. So here is me thinking maybe I've finally figured this shit out, this weird feeling I've had for the last nine months or so when I contemplated what I want this blog to be. I want it to be a place I explore my writing, even if it does become an obsolete form of blogging. Hell, who cares? Nothing stays cool for long, after all.
The post-BlogHer sadness and haze is lifting, and once again, BlogHer has done for me what I needed it to do: made me think, cleared my head, and changed my perspective.
Thank God. I feel so much... cleaner now. And thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of this post. Holy crap it's long, y'all. Much love to all of you that got to the end here.