Who are you, O Reader?
Oh no. Never fear. That is a rhetorical question. This is not a Declare Yourself moment. This is not a Stand Up and Be Counted kind of time. That would Not Be Nice, and most of you (is there a Most of You?) would disregard it, anyway.
Still, the fact remains that there may be more of you than I know. In fact, I know that there are more of you than I know, because, occasionally, you do declare yourselves. Cases in point: a sometime reader identified herself to me just this past Sunday evening, as we sat eating burritos together on Ninth Street. And yesterday, via e-mail, another reader– a long lost college chum– said she’d somehow found this blog and had been reading it, and just wanted me to know she’s there.
Both times the revelation was Most Welcome. Delightful, even.
It’s not that I write this blog for the readers. That would be foolish, at best. I mean, what would I possibly be thinking? What new and wretched variation on my already appalling self-absorbed existence would this be, to actually expect that people would be reading my blog? To actually believe that people check my blog, or even bookmark it, or (and I’m talking to you, Bill and Carolyn, oh father-and-mother-in-law of mine) have it as their homepage?
I was told, when I ever so timidly began this blog seventeen months ago, that I was writing this blog for myself. “You write for yourself,” my blogging friends (all two of them) told me. “You don’t need to care if anyone likes it, or thinks it’s blog-worthy. You are writing for yourself.”
This, of course, was more than my self-aware self-absorption could manage. Write for myself?? Isn’t that a bit… shall we say… selfish? So I started this blog for my family, far-flung. This blog, I decided, would be about our family, and would have photos of our children, and would be a place for me to keep family news for family who cared to read our news.
Nice. Altruistic. Unselfish, yes?
But the catch was (and, oddly, I didn’t see it coming), that a blog is something you write. And writing is something that I love. And so I began to write in my blog. Almost Immediately. I began to write A Lot.
“It’s long. It’s too long, isn’t it?” I whined to Beth. And she said what she’d said in the beginning: “Who cares? Write what you want. You are writing for yourself.”
And I was. And I do. And I am.
I write what amuses me. I write what amazes me, what impresses me, what I want to remember. I write some very specific details about our life here in Durham. I write obliquely about hurt and distress, and I write specifically about it, too. And I send it all out into the ether to the handful of readers who I’m pretty sure are reading, and the others (are there others?) about whom I know absolutely nothing.
A few weeks ago I received a comment from someone I’d never heard of. A Martin LaBar commented on a passage I’d quoted from Lewis’s The Silver Chair. As ever, I was pleased to receive a comment, and, curious, I googled Mr. LaBar to see who he might be.
I found that he, too, has a blog. He writes about what amuses him, what amazes him, what impresses him, what might interest others. He believes in the same God I believe in; he is amazed by this God, and drawn by Him, and his blog hints at a faith fresh and sweet and deeply, deeply real. And often, Very Often, at the end of his postings, Mr. LaBar thanks his readers– whoever they might be– for reading.
I thought that was lovely.
When I think of you out there, those of you that I know read my blog, you number somewhere in the– maybe– twenties. I can’t imagine that any one of you checks every day, that any one of you Really Cares about the musings of my mind.
Still, I keep sending it out there, don’t I? Another and yet another missive to the world-at-large about this quiet life that keeps me always attending to itself.
So I’ll take your reading as the gift that it is: a willingness to listen to me even, perhaps, when the post is Too Long. And I’ll take the example, so humbly set by Mr. LaBar, and say with all sincerity: Thank You So Much for reading.
