Jumpstarting a Dead Blog

Jumpstarting a Dead Blog

It’s Saturday night and I say to FD, ‘I can’t believe I’m resurrecting the old blog.’ He’s noncommittal. In 2006, when I first started blogging, there were virtually no blogs on mental health and mental illness. Now you can get whatever you want, whatever you need, in all kinds of places online. So what’s the point in blogging, my thinking the past five years. FD, ‘So what’s the point again?’ I go, ‘Well, to market a book you have to network on social networking sites and for me to do that would mean establishing some kind of Internet presence, which therapydoc had at one time then frivolously let it waste away. Everyone Needs Therapy didn’t even go to hard cover as an agent suggested it should. In those days literary agents scoured the Internet for bloggers with content that might make a good book.’ Did you even start the book? Well yes, of course. I even have copyright on the title! That's how much of it is on paper. Virtual papers. Why didn't it ever become a thing? A source of income and inspiration? Did I ever tell you how hard it is to write a book? And that agent disappeared into a black hole before I even had a chance to reply to his email. ‘You make writing books seem easy. You knocked off The Book in two years. And I read it as you went along, which isn’t something I do. You know that I only read non-fiction.’ 'That’s because you can’t make that stuff up. It’s from my life. Our lives. Except the historical fiction parts. ‘Which are very good! I never knew much about Ho Chi Minh.’ And now you do. ‘Yes, now I do, thank you.’ So this year there shall be blogging is what I tell him. I will start next week with a case that is in The Book. He will recognize it. A woman sees the world from her balcony because she suffers agoraphobia. She beats it with the help of her cousin the psychiatrist. ‘She beats it! Ah. That’s refreshing.’ It is. So my dear friends, please G-d, we’ll get back to the business of explaining in plain language and silly conversations how people get sick and how they get better because that’s SO easy and fun and so possible, like, all the time. To everyone, because we believe the entire world and everyone in it was created on this coming day: Have a happy, healthy, successful, meaningful year, a year full of laughter, song, prosperity, and heartfelt prayer or just meaningful one-way discussions with Her. With love, therapydoc