A Blog on the People who Blog

A Blog on the People who Blog

I came up with a groundbreaking realization about blogging! It started because I had to write a blog. It was decided that a blog was part of what I was supposed to produce, and so I sat down one afternoon to figure out how this was done. I looked at other blogs. This was my first mistake.

I started with the ones that came up first on Google, which is how you find the most successful examples of a thing. You know, Keywords, Ranking, Search Engine Optimization or whatever they say. I read about ten blogs and then I read fifteen. Then I lost count somewhere around the one blog titled The day I Realized I Had Been Living Wrong or something. I then stopped counting because I had begun to feel something. It was like being closer to the feeling you get when you stare at a word for too long and it stops looking like a word. It becomes something else, like “ba-na-na” is no longer a word for me; it has become Minions! 

The more I read, the less I understood what a blog was meant to be. Some were confessions. Some were instructions. Some were neither but were written with the confidence of both. One person had opinions about oat milk that ran to nine hundred words. Another had documented, in real time, their decision to stop documenting every little thing in life. I read a post about authenticity that looked like it had clearly been revised several times. I read a post about slowing down that was published at 6 AM in the morning. There is no “gotcha!” here, it was 6 AM in the writer’s timezone. 

I kept reading because I thought, eventually, I would find my type. What I found instead were four species of bloggers.

The first blogger blogs about blogging. Their pieces open with Why I Started This Blog, move through Why I Almost Quit This Blog, and arrive, after years of effort, at A Note On Where This Blog Is Going. Where it is going is another post about the blog. They have written more about the act of writing than they have written anything else, and the reader is supposed to find this amusing. Every post ends with a promise that the next one will be more personal. The next one is, again, about the blog. Their call, heard most often in author bios, is: I've been really reflecting on what this space means to me. The space here means the blog. 

The second species learns something from everything. They went through a breakup and got a seven-minute blog out of it. They missed a flight and got another five-minutes of read time. They once stepped on a plastic toy in the dark and published a piece called Pain, Presence, and What My Son's Toy Taught Me About Letting Go. Their life is not lived so much as collected. Each thing that happens to them happens twice. It happens once in reality, and once in the draft they are already composing while it is still happening. You can recognize them by their titles, which follow a pattern so reliable you can generate them yourself. One concrete noun, one abstract noun, one conjunction. Coffee, Clarity, and the Morning I Finally Understood Rest. Traffic, Time, and What the ABC Highway Taught Me About Patience. Their unique selling point is, “And that's when it hit me. It always hits them.”

The third species is the authentic one. Every post begins with, “I don't usually share things like this.” They share things exactly like this every Friday at eleven in the morning. They have a section called “Raw Thoughts,” which is heavily edited. They use the word journey the way other people use punctuation, without registering that the word has been used so many times by so many people, describing so many different things that it has stopped meaning anything at all. Once, they wrote a post about being done ‘performing’ for the internet. It was their highest like rate ever, and thus there was a follow-up. Their call is, “I'm going to be really honest with you today.” They are always trying to be honest and I think that’s a little sad. Are they lonely? I don’t really know. 

The fourth species of bloggers write about the format in which their topics could, theoretically, be written about. Their newsletter exists to explain why the newsletter should exist. They announce, regularly, on the platforms they are leaving, that they are leaving the platforms. Then they end up staying. Their call is, “I think we're all craving something more intentional.” I think they are right. Nobody is craving this; definitely not me. Not right now. 

There is another category yet, that I absolutely cannot fathom, nor do I wish to attempt. The 2 AM philosopher. This kind evaded my fancy and my category list for multiple reasons; one of which was the realization that their brain seemed to be nocturnal. Every post arrives with a warning and late into the night. These are usually raw, astonishingly self-glorified (even the realisations of their non-glory is glorified), and borderline medieval. There is an attempt at humor, which I found you can only appreciate if you read the blogs being sleep-deprived yourself. That’s about it. This is my blog, I am not going to let the 2 AM philosophers have a category of their own. 

All four are (and ugh the fifth!), at this moment, considering writing about this piece. I have been staring at my blank page for a while now. I came here to find my type and I built a taxonomy instead, which probably says something. I am just not sure if it says something I want to publish every Friday at eleven in the morning.

Which category I am, I do not know.