You wouldn't notice if I didn't call your attention to it, but I have cleaned up my website a bit today. Gone are most of the links to other blogs in the right column. This is because most of those blogs, which have adorned this page for years, no longer exist. A few of them are still online, but there has been no activity. I have pulled most of them down, leaving the few active ones behind, although a few, which I either thought were good or because I still have a personal connection with the blogger, remain.
I started writing online just after Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. (The ninth anniverary of that storm is coming up.) I was surprised to find that there was a whole community of blogging doctors. I joined them, to the extent that I am a joiner -- that is to say, not much -- and had my back and forths with them from time to time. Almost all of them are gone, one by one signing off because they said they had lost the passion.
Blogging is not the fad it was in 2005. Facebook has replaced it, along with Tumblr, and a lot of other things I have never heard of. I've tried some of them. I was pretty active on Facebook for a long time, but pulled back after I got into an ugly conflct with a not-so-close family member who accused be of being a communist because I believe in universal health care. At that point I saw that Facebook brings out the ugly in people -- that family member never would have dared to say something like that to my face. So I drastically cut back on my Facebook activity.
Having your own site has its advantages. I am in control here, there is no noise, what I say stays. Note that there are no ads on this page, nothing. That is by design. I am sick of marketing -- everyone is selling something, including, I suppose, me. But I don't see why my website has to be a home for parasites. So here I remain, screw the rest.
Unlike my fellow, now defunct, bloggers, I can't say I have lost the passion to write. That will be with me as long as I live, but as of late I haven't always been expending my creative energies here. Which is all right. This website has never been the center of much online. It has been more a creative outlet for me, and a sight for anyone who wants to look in. Still, its total achievement, hundreds of entries, seems like a monument of some kind, so it will stay, and I will continue to add to it, even if only sporatically.
More than losing the passion, my problem has been that I tend to set the bar too high. I spend a lot of time editing and polishing my posts, and since that is so, any urge to post is counterbalanced by a sense of how much time it will take to prepare my writing. The remedy, of course, is shorter posts, but for me, rarely does a short post stay short. Ideas beget more ideas. That's what makes writing so wonderful.