I have discovered that the Archive link sidebar in WordPress to be an interesting and accurate self-history of sorts. It shows the last six years, broken down by month with a number in parenthesis indicating how many blog posts I wrote during that ~30 day period. Some are in the high twenties. Those are usually months I was happy, excited about life, loving to learn, etc. Even if I wasn’t reading anything particularly good during those times, other thoughts just seemed to spill over regardless.
The bad months? When work is hard or being married is hard or being a father is hard or when adopting foreign child with special needs that can’t speak English is hard – on those months I can’ bring myself to write hardly a thing. My head can barely make it through the day. Ugg. What kind of month it was is marked right there on my blog, serving as a sort of psychological health history.
June 2008 – Moving the family to a new house, 3 posts.
June 2009 – Settled down, only 2 kids, read Humphrey Carpenter’s Inklings bio and more, 56 posts! (Yeah!)October 2010 – Must have blotted whatever happened this month out of my memory, no idea, 1 post.
January 2011 – Wrote a bunch of poems out of nowhere, read some fantastic stuff, 18 posts!March 2011 – African red tape purgatory, adoption paperwork hell, 6 posts.
October 2011 – Traveling to Ethiopia, 25 posts!April 2012 – Child surgeries and attachment challenges, 1 post! (yikes)
July 2012 – 9 posts, things must be getting better
A curious metric. Who knows what blogging will look like after 20 years of this? You may be able to learn something by looking at others’ archive counters as well.