Determining Next Steps

 I have been quiet this week. 

I usually try to post articles on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but this week I have been struggling to write. On Monday morning I felt a dark cloud over me and a weight on my heart and mind that stifled my desire to write. I didn't want to produce something of lower quality than what I usually try to produce, so I decided that I would not force it. I felt very much the same on Wednesday, and now, today is Friday and I still didn't know if I would write anything for today.

I have been writing these articles under a compulsion from God. The views on my articles have been lack lustre and the interaction has been non-existent, so I have had little encouragement to continue my writings except for the compulsion that I have been acting under. At one point, I saw a curious bump in my readership, but I had no explanation for it. Until now.

As it turns out, I have offended some people. These are people that I know personally. These are people who know about this blog and that I am the one that writes it. I am not bothered that I have offended people; that is kind of the nature of a lot of my writings. I try to do so in a way that challenges you but that does not alienate you. If I am not offending you, then I am not hitting on the right buttons to push. A large part of the point of my writings is to stir others to seek God more intentionally than they currently are, and to hopefully point them in a correct direction to find Him.

This is an anonymous blog by design. This is an anonymous blog, but I did share some of my earlier posts on a social media account that I have had locked down for maybe three or four years already. I am quite sure that it is because of these earlier writings posted to social media that my blog has been on the radar of these people in the first place. There was some strong engagement on one or two articles that I posted to my social media page, but I can't see that anybody who read those posts will have saved my page to refer back to all these years later. This has been my thinking as I have been writing on this, my anonymous blog.

There are two or three people for whom this blog has been intentionally non-anonymous. I have received some feedback from them or they have requested information that I have had available here, but I typically do not talk about my blog with anyone. There has always been a possibility that other people who know me could have tracked down this page and read my ramblings, though that would take some effort and sleuthing to accomplish, and the evidence has appeared to present the story that this has not been the case. My interpretation of the data suggests that most people have found my blog through keyword searches in search engines and through a few of my readers actually sharing my articles with others. I thank those people for their confidence in my views and my words. There have possibly been some repeat visitors for a while after they initially found my writings, but those seem to tend to waver off into nothing fairly quickly. All of this is to say that my writings have not had much of a reach. In fact, I would say that the vast majority of my articles have had less than ten readers with a handful of execptions. 

No fame; no glory; only compulsion.

So these people that I have offended, who know me personally, have reached out to me via personal messages. They initially stated that they have issues with my blog and my theology (among other things). I later found out that they felt that I have unfairly called them out and, I guess, maligned their names through my writings? But their names are as anonymous as mine, so... 

Knowing my writings and these people, I had a general timeline and guide to work with to try to figure out the source of their irritation. As it turns out, the bump in my readership coincides with the articles that caused offence having corresponding bumps in views. Apparently, one of the offences is from an article from a while back.

Now, I did not know that these people were reading my blog. In fact, I would wager that most of them were not, and I would have also wagered that none of them were, but I guess at least one of them has been quietly stalking me through my writings, and what they read caused a great enough offence to get them to get the others to read as well. The numbers really jumped, so I don't know if these people pointed yet others to my offensive writings in an effort to gain support for their moral outrage, but my viewing numbers are up a tiny little bit since the initial bump. Like a teeny, tiny little bit.

So now I am faced with a conundrum. My anonymous blog is not so anonymous anymore. It also appears that there may be a few more eyes on my writing than there was before (not many, though I am fairly confident that the number is even 👀👀). If my writings were still anonymous, that would be a good thing. Since my veil of anonymity has now been pierced, I'm not sure what to do. 

I have sometimes played with the idea of trying to monetize my writing at some time in the future, but (doing the math) no readers, times no money from the articles, plus the square root of a lack of viewer growth, (carry the one); yeah, it doesn't really math right now. Maybe God has different plans, but that is for future me to figure out. Current me needs to determine if there is any value in continuing my ramblings on this platform under this pseudonym.

So I am making a request. If you are reading this and you have found any value whatsoever (even the tiniest little bit) in the things that I have been writing, I would appreciate a comment or an email from you to tell me as much. If you are posting a comment and you actually know who I am, please remember that this is supposed to be an anonymous blog and do not mention me by name. If you want to send me an email, you can access my email address in my profile information on my home page.

It may not be so much that I will stop writing, but I may have to stop posting to this platform since I can no longer write under the guise of anonymity, which offers a lot of freedom of thought and expression. This is were I am going to be struggling to determine what my next steps are. I had one or two ideas of how to improve my postings, but that is all on hold right now until the future of my writings is determined.