Originally, I started this blog with the intention of keeping it secret. “It’s going to be about spirituality,” I told one of my friends, “and that’s just way to embarrassing to let be public.”

“But you could tell me!” she said, “I won’t comment on it, or anything!”

Well, OK I decided. I’d tell her, cuz she’s out town anyway. So, I told my one friend.

Then, I wrote an article on my experience with sexism which was a little bit embarrassing, but I sort of wanted people to read that one (especially some of my old coworkers, *cough*) so I shared it on Facebook. And I got like, 100 views, and I was super excited (I’m so fancy! With my 100 views! OH YEAH!) And, I figured some of them would see the embarrassing hippie stuff I write (I mean, the title of this blog is Love and Void) but would overlook and never bring it up, and so it would be fine.

Anyway, today it looked like my traffic had totally flatlined except in the last hour, so I figured ok, cool – back to my embarrassing hippie blog that no one reads and I can be totally open about my thoughts on enlightenment (I’m scared!) and it will be great. Except, it hadn’t flatlined, someone had linked to me, and I’d gotten 2 thousand views in the past hour totally dwarfing all my previous views. That may not be a lot in the “how many views important blogs get” sense, but was a lot in the “more views I’ve ever gotten on any post I’ve written ever” sense.

And it’s sort of funny, because like, 2 years ago, I would have been so psyched. I think I put some of my stuff up on Reddit, I tried to get people to read what I wrote. To no avail! No one cared about my writing when I was like “Please, please, pleeeeeze notice me notice meeee!!!!” And no one did.

I’ve played the “watching traffic” game so many times – at the companies I work at, for my own blogs, for my own web pages. And, it’s such a painful game, because usually you don’t get any. But, when you do, it’s this total flurry of overexcitement “oh my god, how can we *capitalize* on this?”, “how can we USE this,” “wait, what? It’s over? Where is everyone going?”

And, I can sort of feel this in my heard right now. “Ah, yessss – everyone sees how special I am and will be awed by my awesome writing and I can write a book, and everyone will read it, and the world will be healed!” But, I have enough experience to know that this won’t happen. The traffic will leave, and I’ll be here with my blog and this sort of empty sense of “remember that one day I got a whole lot of traffic? That was the day!”

Except! I also got an email today, from one of my brother’s friends who had read Goodbye. She thanked me for writing the post, and said she thought it might help her in the future with her own goodbyes. I think to truly listen to someone is to give them a great gift, and to learn from someone is one of the greatest respects you can pay them.

So now, I’ll have “Remember that day I got a lot of traffic? That was the day Laurie let me know she was really hearing me, what a great day!”