On Blogging: A Journey in Twelve Months

1. There’s something about February that makes people want to start a new life on a blog. I don’t know what it is, but everytime I visit a site, I dig into the archives to uproot the first post. February!

2. Many of us have no idea why we start blogging. It must have something to do with (1) above. Maybe finding ourselves? Getting out of our head? Or because January didn’t prove to be as perfect as we expected.

3. We don’t always know what we’re doing or even writing about. So we flutter across numerous niches, write anything that feels remotely likeable, click publish and hold our breathes (maybe bite the nails too).

4. Oh we obsess over Stats, First likes, First shares, First comments. Ever had that giddy feeling? Yes! It’s awesome and we know finally that someone out there is paying attention to us.

5. Then we take those baby steps out of our hole. He said hi, I should go knock on his door too. Err but what do we say? Anything that shows we made an attempt to read what was written to begin with. Or we just read, run away and come back some other time.

6. We go back again. And again. And again. And one day we say something back to them — the visitors — and they thank us for stopping by. We explore other random sites and find fodder. Flesh for our thoughts. Fresh insights to everything we could possibly imagine.

7. Sometimes we think about quitting. Too many mental blocks. There’s nothing to write about. There are no visitors. OMG what are we doing wrong! We go on a hiatus, but we come back anyway because we are not quitters. We hammer on our keyboard word for word until something slightly sensible begins to take form.

8. Finally we begin to find ourselves. Our voice. We start to love the sound of us. We still haven’t figured out why the idea of blogging came to us in February, but we know in all that wandering we were simply finding our way here. Because you see, not every wandering man is lost. He could just be looking for something he doesn’t yet know.

9. We learn to network, build our community and market ourselves. When our friends ask when we’ll start generating money from our site, we tell them maybe in the future. For now we are having fun poking around like toddlers.

10. But just when we’re starting to have fun with redecorating to suit our newly discovered style, we learn a year is already gone. One whole year with no sign of slowing down. One year with room for more. Much more.

11.  The most valuable lesson we learn though is that one thing is important. It’s not the stats even though it has a positive relationship with our ego-meter. It’s not the number of followers either. It’s the community. Those who share their thoughts. Those who bless us with ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. And the ones who would rather remain invisible but come to read anyway (and we still wish they’d say something). All of them from Africa, Asia, Europe, America … all over the world whom we connect with.

12. Twelve is when we come to thank everybody who have been a part of this. For their time, support, encouragement, lessons and opportunities. Some of these people gave us direction. Some assailed our senses with beautiful words that made us push ourselves. And many others  gave us more perspective of life. We became more confident, wiser, knowledgeable and bolder because of them.

TML is a year old today {do the happy wiggle 💃 here} and this is my way of taking you through an exciting journey so far. Thank you for being a part of it and I look forward to another terrific year with all of you.