Abandonment issues

I fear that I am becoming disenchanted with this diary. It seems I regularly go through love-hate cycles concerning it, and I must be entering one of the less benign periods. This could be related to the fact that I regularly sit down to update late at night, just before bed, and can’t think of anything in the least brilliant to say because I am too sleepy or I have simply forgotten all the wonderful things I meant to write about during the day.

Yesterday, for instance, I started wondering whatever happened to those diarists I used to read at the beginning of my tenure. Remember Kris-tee, the girl who had married a boy she knew for approximately three weeks, got pregnant almost immediately, hated her job, and updated regularly until after her son was born, at which point she dropped off the face of the earth, probably because being a mom took too much time and energy and she was emotionally fulfilled to the point where she didn’t need to confide in strangers anymore? I sometimes wonder how she is doing, in an oblique kind of way.

Then there are those diarylanders whose acquaintance I made in the chat room, people I felt I got to know rather well, but who just up and disappeared during one of the long, dark, chat room demises (one of which we are suffering as I write). Every so often I find myself asking lamp posts and computer peripherals if they’ve heard any news.

Now people if have grown to love (yes, love; I don’t think it’s too strong a word) have left diaryland because of the technical non-support issue. I still keep up with these folks, having discovered Google Reader, which allows me to subscribe to all sorts of websites that update regularly. But I don’t feel the same kinship with them that I did when they were blogging regularly here, if you know what I mean. I miss seeing their names in red on my buddy list. I don’t like having to click on a separate link to leave them messages. I feel ever-so-slightly abandoned.

Maybe that’s it: I’m suffering from abandonment issues. That’s just downright weird for me to say that. Diaryland has never been a great place for feedback anyway. It was just a place where I got a warm fuzzy feeling in lieu of comments. When I first started here, Jenn insisted I add the html to my site that would link to my notes page, but over time, people left fewer and fewer notes. The comments page is even more depressing. It’s really the only feature of being a super gold member that I actually employ, and it’s hardly worth it.

I AM NOT BEGGING FOR COMMENTS! Please believe me. I don’t need people to tell me, “We love your diary! Don’t ever stop, please!” although it might be nice to hear that. No, I don’t really know what I want, except maybe that the world not be so large, that it not be so costly to travel or that international borders weren’t such a deterrent to visiting friends in far-flung time zones. Now that I have made friends here, I want to hang out with them in real time, drink red wine, eat tapas, go to concerts, play music together, bake cookies and share hair-dressing tips. This diary has just opened doors to relationships that I long to have.

I wonder how many other people out there feel the same way.

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