Monday, January 31, 2011

Pay Attention to Me! Or don't. That's fine.

So. I haven’t been here for a while, but I’ve been feeling the urge to write something lately so here I am, although I’m not entirely sure what to write about anymore. I’ve covered most of my faults, or at least the ones I’m willing to talk about publicly, so what else is there? I guess I could do a diet update, but even I’m not particularly interested in that, so I’d hardly expect anyone else to be. I miss writing regularly, but I think having a break from it has been a good thing. I'm not sure that many people write or read blogs much anymore, do they? I know I don’t read as many as I used to, so maybe it’s just a bit old school in these days of Twittering and Facebook updating.

I’ve always struggled with the attention seeking aspects of blog writing, anyway. I normally avoid undue attention as much as possible and, if asked, I would say I hate being the centre of attention. But I realise that this isn’t entirely true. I want to be noticed as much as the next person; I’m just very quiet and unassuming about it. It’s more a case of I quite like being on the outskirts of attention, just not right smack in the centre of it. I want to be noticed without me having to draw attention to myself, if that makes sense, which admittedly hardly ever works. And we all go searching for attention in our own ways, don’t we? It’s just that I have a very odd relationship with it. On the one hand I like and need it, obviously, but on the other I don’t assume that all attention is going to be good. In fact, in my mind, the more I put myself out there the more likely it is that someone is going to come along and say something less than positive. How awful would that be?! Of course this has never happened, but don’t doubt the ability of a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist like myself to assume the worst. In fact, blog-wise, all I’ve ever gotten was lovely, like-minded people saying kind and supportive things, so it is an entirely irrational and unfounded fear, but I wouldn't let that stop me. Mostly I just feel like I’m having a constant “Pay attention to me! Don’t look at me! Why aren’t they looking at me?!” conversation with myself. It can be exhausting inside my head; I really must get out of it more often.

Anyway, on the positive side, hardly anyone reads this anymore, which in theory should make me feel less self-conscious about it, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. I now know there may be something worse than getting negative attention – not getting any attention at all. So all this boils down to me, here, writing a blog about writing blogs in an effort to get some sort of attention (hey, it turns out I do have more faults to write about. Awesome.) Not so much ironic as it is pathetic, really. I imagine you feel the much the same way having read right to the end, huh? Sorry about that, but thanks for paying attention.