Ripping out my soul for your entertainment… examining my first year of blogging.
Before my Craigslist–mirror went viral, I’d decided that it was sheer foolishness to have ever thought I would make a dent in the internet.
In fact, if I had any sense at all, I would have quit blogging around six months.
Six months is what separates the sensible people— who go back to their lives.
From the total lunatics— who decide to double down.
Somewhere here, I more than doubled down.
I pushed all my chips in.
I borrowed money from the mob.
I started snorting cocaine in the high-roller suites and set fire to the drapes.
Somewhere here I stopped feeling like a writer.
Or a doer of house projects.
Or a researcher of toilets.
I turned into a version of myself that I had never met– someone who would do WHATEVER IT TAKES. To get people to read my blog.
The word that comes to mind is hustler.
For me, at six months, a very tiny dictator woke up in my head.
She was mean. And wore all grey.
And she looked just like me.
She said: vee must take over zee vurld.
And I agreed.
I thought if I could make it to one year—the parade would begin.
And I believed in my own infallibility— also defined as psychotic self-delusion.
Any megalomaniacal dictator can tell you that the first few months of a war are the best—there are impassioned speeches… the troops are excited… you haven’t run out of food and had to eat the horses.
But sometime between six months and a year is when you get an inkling that perhaps it’s not a matter of simply controlling the world with your mind.
This inkling grows in size and scope… until sometime around month eight, when you have a mini-breakdown.
But no one cares about your breakdown.
No one cares that you are having a crisis of the soul.
They don’t care, because blogging is synonymous with 24-year-old fashionistas in neon sunglasses, so attempting to convey to people the IMPORTANCE of your blog makes you sound like a total moron.
It also doesn’t help that much of what you say is rant-like: about how no one has shown up, and how this is UNACCEPTABLE.
And for the record, if there is anything less sympathetic to people than a 36-year-old woman crying about her blog, I do not know what it is.
In fact, if you want to confirm all of people’s worst suspicions about you? This is the way to do it.
And then– if somehow your blog makes it to one year? Instead of the parade you anticipated, you get the gift of FINALLY grasping the idiocy of your undertaking.
You finally understand that there are roughly one billion other blogs. And that the chances of yours being special are so microscopic as to be nonexistent.
So now you have two choices:
1. You can accept defeat and go spend time with your family.
2. You can commit yourself to self-delusion.
Lucky for me, I’ve been training in self-delusion all my life.
It is my second-greatest talent.
What’s my first? Enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm beyond what is reasonable.
Beyond what is even remotely reasonable.
That endless enthusiasm is what makes people think I am fun. Unless they have to spend too much time with me, in which case it can be wearing… Because when I am excited about something? LOOK OUT.
I am going overboard.
I am going to fling myself off the side of the ship with no life vest or scuba gear or shark-repellant.
And I’ll be screaming— OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS THING!
I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING SO EXCITING!!
EXCITING, EXCITING, EXCITING.
And you’re going to have to call in a Marine search-and-rescue team to find me in the ocean. (If you’re the one calling, please make sure they only send young Marines… Let’s say under 32, shall we?)
Somewhere in the last year, ALL my enthusiasm BECAME this blog… They merged into one entity—indistinguishable from each other.
I stopped caring about anything else. My only interest became pushing this blog forward… Uphill in a tornado… in an ice storm… carrying it over mountains while being pecked by vultures.
To do WHATEVER it takes.
Anything.
If human sacrifice were required, it would take me no time at all to build the altar.
October 1, 2013 @ 10:45 am
PLEASE carry on! Your blog is one of two I read. I am enamored with your way of teetering on the brink of insanity in your high heels, dragging an enormously impractical mirror behind you. Most importantly, you make me snort laugh, and that’s hard to do to me with mere words. Carry on, please!
October 1, 2013 @ 11:51 am
“teetering on the brink of insanity in your high heels”
going in my folder of comments that totally made my day… xo
October 1, 2013 @ 10:47 am
We love you! We really love you! I know that your blog is destined for greatness and I hope you take the time to revel in how far you’ve come already! The pictures alone in this post are some of the most fab things I’ve ever seen 🙂
October 1, 2013 @ 10:48 am
I don’t like blogs, as a rule. But I like this one. No, I love it. Keep writing it.
October 1, 2013 @ 10:52 am
Your insanity is too attractive for me to leave…!
October 1, 2013 @ 10:54 am
And yet here you are, looking all pretty and saying and doing all of the things I wish I was doing. You are enchanting. Don’t ever stop. I need you to continue for so many reasons. But the main one is that I just enjoy the hell out of you!
Nothing is worth selling your soul. Perhaps sharing it is enough. 🙂
October 1, 2013 @ 11:00 am
Keep Blogging!
October 1, 2013 @ 11:03 am
I completely and totally still love you and the fact that you are ripping out your soul to entertain us. AND I would be in the water with you, waiting for a yummy (young! I mean young! Hell, I’ll take old, too) marine!
October 1, 2013 @ 11:07 am
I don’t know what you’re doing but you’re doing it right! I love your blog, you had me laughing from the first time I read it! Ahhhh you just crack me up…
October 1, 2013 @ 11:09 am
Simply “The Best”….can’t find a blog I enjoy more than yours!
October 1, 2013 @ 11:11 am
I saw a really big mirror with gold at estate sale and thought of you. Wanted to send you a photo just in case you were still looking but California is a long way and I had no camera.
See, we are watching, listening and I love the outfit, the peplum and the pearls. Keep it up.
October 1, 2013 @ 11:15 am
Two comments:
1) Did you actually have a sign with words, or just a white card and photoshopped words later? If the answer is the previous, that’s awesome. If the latter, I wonder what people (ie. wedding party) were thinking you were doing?!
2)You are now blogging about blogging a lot lately and not really about the house – and yet you garner enormous readership – which of course comes from your enormous enthusiasm – and that you’ve maintained the crazed followers that we are, means you have MADE it. In my world anyways 🙂
Don’t ever stop writing. Even if you just write about Marines under 30. I would’ve appreciated some photos of that though.
October 1, 2013 @ 11:28 am
A real sign– no photoshop.
If there comes a time when I have access to Marines under 30 (or any age)… I will NOT be here for a while. I know you all will understand.
October 1, 2013 @ 11:16 am
You are fantabulous. And while I lack a certain amount of your enthusiasm, I sympathize completely. Blogging is crazypants. Crazypants and emotional and threatens to throw you off the edge at any moment. But worth it 🙂
October 1, 2013 @ 11:18 am
Please do not stop writing!!! I love your blog. Seriously love your blog. You are crazy. You are uplifting. You make me smile and giggle out loud. You have attention to detail that I will never have. You go on wilder goose chases than I do to find interesting pieces. You are as addicted to craigslist as I am to kijiji. Please realize we love it when you entertain us. Please do not stop!!!!
October 1, 2013 @ 11:22 am
Love, Love, Love your blog. I get an excitement when I see a message from you in my Inbox that makes me hurry up and click the link because if I wait too long, I might miss my chance! (Which is clearly not happening, but for some reason I get this panicky feeling that it will.) And God forbid I miss it, I might as well chew on glass for the rest of the day. Keep it up, we are reading, laughing and loving it all!
October 1, 2013 @ 11:25 am
You are fantastic!
October 1, 2013 @ 11:30 am
I think this is the first time I’ve ever commented here, but I just wanted to tell you that you’re hilarious and I love you. I also want to know if that sign is Photoshopped or if you were legit peddling your blog to the masses. (FYI: I’m down with either one, but I think it’s funnier if you have zero shame. Also, I think it means we could be friends.)
October 1, 2013 @ 11:41 am
REAL SIGN. (although I cannot claim to have no shame, as I definitely felt umm… idiotic)
October 1, 2013 @ 11:45 am
Beauty shots of Philly
October 1, 2013 @ 11:47 am
Victoria, you are endlessly entertaining…about everyday normal events. It makes my day when you post a new blog, always good for a laugh!
October 1, 2013 @ 11:51 am
It looks like your boobs have sagged.
And I still love you.
October 1, 2013 @ 11:54 am
I love, love, love reading your blog. I follow a lot of blogs but only check out the recipes or the pictures. Yours is the only one I actually read and get excited to see in my “in box”. That last sentence sounds like I live a lonely, pathetic life, which is untrue. But I do look forward to your emails. Thanks for sharing your talented wit and writing style with the billions of fans that you are accruing.