identity crisis

I just pruned my Bloglines. I am now down from eighty to about fifty feeds.

Many of these survivors are people who rarely post anymore; but I would have felt like a traitor if I had’ve pressed the little trashcan icon on them. 

I felt brutal enough as it was.

The blogging world is a funny, political place. Especially, I guess, when it’s a community tied together with like issues the way the IF blogosphere is.

I remember soon after I started my blog, searching people’s link lists and looking at blog after blog, commenting if I had something to say. I would do this for hours, literally. If they came over to comment on my blog, I would comment back. And thus it began.

I collected almost a hundred feeds this way. I say feeds; I mean friends.

At some point, I realised enough was enough. I stopped responding to new commenters on my site unless they came back a few times, and rarely took on new blogs – unless the writing really, really captured me. I gave up on fiddling with my sidebar and left it as it was. I unsubscribed to all those uber-IF-bloggers-who-shall-not-be-named, figuring they had enough readers; they didn’t need my support too.

Thank you to those of you who persisted with me anyway.

It’s funny – I’m only a couple of months off my two-year blogoversary now (Does a blogoversary re-set if you change sites? Hmm…) and almost all of the people who were on my hundred-feed Bloglines account have either gotten pregnant, are in the process of adoption, or have had a child and stopped blogging.

Most commonly the latter. And that’s great, of course. It’s what we want to see.

However, the stats at my old blog fell lower and lower the more I obsessed about breastfeeding, until I really only had my trustiest of buds visiting, and the many people who googled their way into my 12 week ultrasound photo.

I suppose the transitory nature of our subject matter does that. It gets harder and harder for people to visit as they have more and more treatments. I get that. I’ve even had one or two sideways confrontations about it over time.

But I feel kind of good about being here now, ready to redefine myself as something other than an infertility blogger.

I just don’t know what.

I don’t know whose links to peruse.