Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What are some recent challenges you faced?

I don’t mind admitting that I’m not a big fan of this prompt. I struggled with it most of the day today. Of course, the irony of that is the fact that for the last several months, I’ve actually been responding to prom the night before, just so I can post them at 5 AM the next day. 

Most of the challenges I’ve been facing lately are, quite frankly, self induced. I’m not going to get the specifics right now, but there are things that I’m dealing with because quite frankly, I mean the choices that I made in life.

That is my only way out of the self-induced challenges is to confront them face forward.; Or simply remove myself from the situation.

I wrote those last two paragraphs earlier this morning, and I was struggling to come up with a proper response to this prompt. Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me that I had an answer to this prompt sitting right in front of me.

Writing this very blog has become a challenge for me over the last two weeks.

Granted, for the last 4 1/2 days, I made a whirlwind trip to South Carolina to see kid ones’s graduation. So I knew for at least this time, it was gonna be difficult finding time to blog. But I did so. I’ll be at haphazardly. I feel like on a couple of these recent posts I was kind of “phoning it”

I’m not any kind of “social media influencer“ or super well-known blogger or anything like that. So for me when I get any numbers, any traffic to my blog, I’m usually pretty happy. A little over two years ago, I got into the habit of posting at least once every single day. And many occasions I was posting twice a day. There were rare occasions were actually posted three times.

During this time, I’ve seen my blog get more traffic than never has in the 12 previous years I was writing. When I started this blog, I think I was jumping on the “men’s mental health“ bandwagon before other people were. Unfortunately, I had no means of networking And trying to find other like-minded individuals was extremely difficult. Then, I got into my relationship with X2. So there was a span of several years where I may have posted a handful times.

So I think most of you, those of you who are bloggers at least, will understand when I say that seeing traffic go up on the blog is kind of addictive. And I don’t write just for the traffic. I write for myself. I write because I love to write and I find it to be very therapeutic.

But, when there’s a self-induced expectation of “I have to post something today“ or “I have to be sure I make multiple posts on a day because I can get more traffic that way“ it is very taxing. In some ways that kind of sucks all the joy out of blogging.

And maybe that’s the rub. Maybe in order to get the kind of traffic or have the kind of reach that I want to have, I’ve really gotta commit to this almost like a full-time job.

In that regard, the good news is that my summer vacation is coming up very soon. I have roughly week and a half left of school. Maybe then I’ll be a little bit more re-energized and more motivated to you not just right and right consistently, but put out better quality stuff as well.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Acknowledge Me: The Simple Art of Being Seen
• Rob’s Retro Movie Review: This is Spinal Tap (1984) – The Movie That Scaled to Eleven
• A Death in the Family (And My Disposable Income): My Life in Comics
• The Supporting Cast: Navigating the Eras of Male Friendship
• Life is What Happens: A Look Back at My Non-Existent 2025 Vision

The article “this blog is my current challenge“ first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.