# 116 BLOGGER DISEASE & DISABILITY

Every occupation or recreational pastime has health risks. If you work with asbestos you are aware it could affect your lungs. If you work on skyscrapers, you are aware you could fall. And if you are a Blogger, there are similar risks critical to the good health of your mind, body, and soul.

You know whereof I speak. The Disease of Bloggers that turns them from vibrant, bouncing, prose-loving imaginative creatures into incapacitated invalids. A disease with symptoms that include writer’s block, lack of imagination and creativity, sometimes disinterest, and often serious depression brought on by an inability to build a stimulating thought. Or the sudden and unexplained plummeting of reader numbers. A disease-ridden time when a Blogger’s skin is itchy and so sensitive that even interwoven with the discussion of the most mundane matters are thoughts of political and societal expectations that run interference.

And during spells of Blogger illness, I find that everything is tossed around in one’s head until it is quite fatigued. The things that I want to say for my own soul-cleansing therapy are handicapped by my doubt about the wisdom of such openness. And politically, I have thoughts that are so in opposition to mainstream thinking that I suspect voicing them will create a huge outcry of critical or snide rejection.

The problems become self-propagating and soon I have a mountain of concerns that cause pain and stress. As a Blogger, I’m certain you can identify with my sick days. Hasn’t it happened to all of us at one time or another? Those gawd-awful yucky days when, as Bloggers, we feel painfully disabled, discounted, disproved, and unsubstantiated. Concerned that readers are slamming our blog windows shut with a rough click of the mouse while vowing to never go there again! Ever!

But then, oh joy, like so many other medical maladies and mysteries, there suddenly comes a time of complete remission. And my little spell of remission came when I sat down to the computer this morning. I am back to writing with wild and free abandonment. Writing for the sake of writing. Writing for me. Writing because it is my passion. And whether I get 40 readers or 1 is of no matter. Whether I get feedback or not is of no matter. I am so in remission that I’m not even thinking about whether it is time to post again or whether I should give the current post a bit more shelf life. I am so in remission that it matters not to me if what I write is titillating, original, witty, interesting, or totally stupid. My muses are ecstatic, giggling and flitting about with glee. No longer caged, no longer restrained. Age appropriate, politically appropriate, religiously appropriate, morally appropriate, socially appropriate – none of it matters. The writing is what matters.

So having made this confession, I hope that if you chance to come by, you can put up with me until I relapse once again into the restraints of the usual wisdom and debate that monitors every word I write. For Blogger Disease and Disability there is no known all-time cure but thankfully it occasionally goes into remission. As Martha would say, “It is a good thing.”

At least for now the things I write will not be restricted in the anxious way they were yester-week, yester-month, and yester-year.

So right now are you immobilized or in remission?