Under Pressure
So a couple of days ago I wrote a blog post, for the first time in ages.
Those of you who have been here from the beginning (Hi! How are you both?) will know that, even at the start, I doubted my own ability to keep this up for very long. The reasons for this are many and varied, but include:
- outright laziness. I am a slob. When I come home from work, I want to sit on the sofa and have Oompa-Loompas bring me food, wine and entertaining television* until it’s bedtime. I do not want to have to use my brain, or subject my RSI-raddled wrists to further torture. Which brings us to:
- work. I often think that maybe I should try to put my mind to writing something during my lunchbreak. The main stumbling block here is that my lunchbreak often only lasts for five minutes, which means that I either have to think at 200 words a minute, or restrict myself to tiny microessays.
- a huge inferiority complex. I read other blogs (see blogroll over there → for examples) and think, God, that’s so much funnier / cleverer / more original than anything I could ever write. Maybe I won’t bother.
- a very short attention span. I sit down, start writing, and decide after one sentence that this would go much better if only I had A Cup Of Tea. Making the cup of tea turns into Wishing There Were Biscuits turns into Rummaging In The Cupboard turns into Refilling The Muesli Box turns into Taking The Rubbish Out turns into Talking To Him Next Door For Thirty Minutes turns into, oh bollocks, I can’t remember what I was going to put now.
These issues, and a general lack of inspiration and self-discipline, have resulted in a workrate surpassed only in its inadequacy by the staff on the tills at TKMaxx**.
However.
Yesterday, my post was given the oxygen of publicity by a very kind person on Twitter who has 100 followers for every one of mine. In a couple of hours, the hits on my page had gone from an embarrassingly low barely-double-figures type number, to over 300, and people are still visiting even as I write. Which is, of course, amazing and wonderful and lovely and makes me happier than Wayne Rooney’s bank manager. But now, in the cold light of day, I suddenly feel a whole new level of performance anxiety. People are looking. I need to say something funny and clever and original to prove that it wasn’t a fluke.
Excuse me a moment. I’ve just remembered I need to wash up. Back in a sec.
*note: this has never actually happened. But I live in hope.
** I’m sure there must be some good ones somewhere. But I’ve been holding this grudge since 1995, and I’m not putting it down now.
Something Blonde 
Whenever you tweet that you’ve written a new blog post, I always read it and I always enjoy it. You really should write more! But I completely know where you’re coming from on many of these points.
However, I can relate to point 3 more than anything. Now, Imma let you finish, but I think I’ve got the biggest inferiority complex of all time. OF ALL TIME! Almost every week I’ll read a blog post that someone’s written, and come away thinking: “I should really just delete the blog and run off into the night.” But I suppose if every blogger did that, there’d be no blogs.
So keep writing. Don’t stop! Your readership will probably grow now (after your thoroughly deserved celebrity endorsement!) but don’t let that pressure you. Your best stuff will come when you’re ready to write something, not because you feel the pressure to write something.