A week and a half ago I posted my blog post I've Been Suicidal Most of My Life. I posted it about 8:30pm, posted it on Facebook and went to bed. When I woke up in the morning I opened my Blogger Dashboard (It gives my statistics about page views). My usual page-views for my other blogs was around 30 -50 total. When I checked it that morning it was over 1000. Today it's almost to 2,000. A little different you think?
I went on my Facebook and had A LOT of messages, private and public. Most were their stories. Many were "I've never told anyone this but I've been depressed for a long time" and "You put into words what I feel" and so on and so forth. The news and local newspaper got a hold of me. Random people would come up to me and family members in tears. Overall, the reaction to my blog was enlightening and emotional. Today I have copied and pasted all comments, large and small, into a personal file. 21 pages worth.
It was an eye opener. People are suffering, a lot of people. I can see just in my circle of friends how badly people needed someone to relate to. How many others need to hear this as well? I feel so small in such a big world. A world where there are so many just like me and I never knew. Do they know that they are not alone? I wish I had a way to tell them, to give them a hug and a warm smile. To tell them everything will be alright.
I've always been too afraid to be so open about personal struggles on my own blog but you have made me wonder if that's a mistake. Not because I was 2,000 page views (holy cow dayna!) but because what if it could help someone?
ReplyDeleteI don't think I would have ever shared my story the way I did until I received a pretty big prompting to do so. I actually got the impression to share my depression story months before I wrote it...but I was just scared. It was the whole reason I started my blog. But I was too nervous to write about so I wrote about other stuff first.
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