Moving on

There's a lot of moving on to do around here. No, don't worry, I'm not going the way of so many other Jbloggers and closing my blog--the only way that will happen is if my mother finds it, which she won't, because she barely knows how to use the Internet. :) *bli ayin hara, poo poo poo*

However, it is time to talk about something besides the JIBs--thanks to all who voted for me, I appreciate your support! I didn't win, but truth be told, I hadn't even expected to get to the finals, so even that was an achievement. Maybe I'll have better luck next year. Now, until next year, they are over, and I shall speak of other things.

It's interesting for me to look back at past posts, both on this blog and my little personal poetry corner, Patches of Poetry. Sometimes I was happy, often I wasn't. Now, overall, I think I'm in a different place than I was when I started this blog. At first, I just had a few fans, regular readers, with whom I would have comment-fests back and forth in the comments section, and since we knew each other fairly well, we could add outside insight (if that makes sense?) into our comments. Some I knew in real life, a few not, but we all read each others' blogs religiously and commented on every little thing.

Now, though, most of my early readers have left the blog world either largely or altogether, which is sad, but I find myself now much more a part of the larger J-blogosphere, and I like that. It's not as personal as it was before, but that's partly by design. In part, it's because there are a couple of readers from whom I was deliberately hiding my state of mind for some time, and while most of them either no longer read this blog or no longer comment, I don't necessarily know which of those two is the case, and anyway, it became a habit not to discuss my inner workings so freely. I would rather my identity not be glaringly obvious in case someone I know accidentally happens across my little corner of the Jblog world.

I think another reason why I haven't really gotten into what goes on inside my head so much is because I didn't want to...disappoint people, I guess. I felt like, people have a certain image of me, and I didn't want to alter that image. Sometimes we can change who we are by pretending to be someone else, and I felt that if I didn't post about my negative thoughts and feelings then I could be that other person, the one who is happy and self-confident and generally optimistic.

Now, I'm starting to rethink that. After having encountered some very personally revealing (and sometimes surprising) posts around the J-blogosphere, I'm rethinking my decision to hold back. The likelihood that the people I'd been avoiding are still bothering to read this seems to grow less and less as time passes (and do me a favor--if you think you're one of them, and you're still reading, give me the heads-up). And I'm beginning to realize that people will not look down on me for being who I am. I've been burned before, but maybe the fact that most of us don't actually know each other helps--it's easier to be unjudgmental to an anonymous blogger than with one's friends, sometimes. We shall see.

While this post has somehow turned into something else entirely than what I'd planned to write when I first sat down to write it, I think I'm going to leave it this way. I'll leave whatever else I was going to say for a different day. Have a good one!