A Million Thank Yous

My original plan for today was to tell you all about Belinda Jack’s fascinating The Woman Reader; however, as evidenced by how quiet things have been around these parts, I’m still finding it really hard to get anything written. I was about to call it quits for the day when I noticed that the little hits counter on the bottom left corner of my blog had finally passed the one million mark, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to thank you all for stopping by, whoever you are.

This post comes with a couple of caveats: first of all, I don’t want it to sound self-aggrandizing. I’ve been blogging for over five years now, and I’m well aware of the fact that there are plenty of blogs out there that reached twice as many visits in half as many years, and that can therefore wave around numbers far more impressive than mine. Secondly, visits are a poor measurement of how many people are actually reading and engaging with your content anyway – a good share of those hits are likely to have come from spam bots, from people who left without reading a single full post, from people looking for something very specific and who never really came back, and even from myself, as it took me a couple of years to get around to blocking my IP address from stats sites.

And lastly, I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of equating stats with worth of any kind, for all the reasons expressed so well in this Stacked post:

Stats, as interesting as they are, really don’t tell us anything. They don’t tell us the true impact of what we’re doing. They don’t tell us whether what we said made someone buy a book. They don’t tell us how many people added a book to their GoodReads to-read shelf (sure you could extrapolate, but that’s giving yourself a lot of credit). They don’t tell us anything about ourselves except that we exist and, in some cases, we should be paid attention to. Because we ARE reaching someone. Just . . . we can’t know more than that.

The inevitable question, then, is why I’m bothering to mention reaching one million hits at all. The first reason is that, as I explained on Twitter the other day, I’m trying to use the relatively safe context of blogging to practice owning my achievements and becoming more comfortable with saying, “Hey, here’s something cool that I did”. Right now drawing attention to myself in any way makes me all panicky (and yes, that includes writing this post. Insert several deep breaths here), but sadly that kind of reluctance is not something that gets you very far in the current job market. So: the one million landmark doesn’t tell me I’m bigger or better or more important or influential than anyone else, but it does tell me that I’m reaching someone; that people are bothering to stop by; that some of them actually value what I do; that they haven’t stopped visiting despite my recent erratic posting schedule and other blogging ups and downs. And that means something to me.

This brings me to the second and most important reason why I’m posting this: because I’m honestly grateful to each and every one of you who has ever found my blog useful or worth reading it, be it on a single occasion or on a regular basis. And to express my gratitude, I thought I’d do something I haven’t been able to do in a long while. When I mentioned my bookmark collection a few weeks ago, several of you expressed interest, so by the end of the week I’ll draw a name from the metaphorical hat and send the winner a bookmark tailored to his or her taste. The giveaway is open to everyone: if you want to be entered, all you have to do is leave a comment and make sure I’ll be able to reach you via e-mail or social media. Again, thank you all so much for stopping by over the past five years.