When Do You Stop Blogging?

Disclaimer: I’m just asking, nothing is ending yet. Cancel your celebration plans o 3n elshmata :p

 

Over my four madry five years of blogging, I’ve asked myself this question over and over again, ever since the start.

Pre- 2008 it started with the question “Should I even blog?” before starting the blog.
During 2008, it with the first few posts, “Should I continue to blog? Is there anyone reading out there? Do I care if anyone was reading?”
Come 2009, the second year, my question became “Am I a dot of ink on the newspaper of blogsphere? How do I measure up to other bloggers? Will I ever be someone?”
In 2010, the third year, I had some blogging friends, I was on twitter and facebook, and my question became “Will anyone remember my blogs existence if I disappeared?”
By 2011, my blog was a little more famous than before, my worrisome nagging question was “Can I keep the status quo, or at least improve? if so, until when?”
Now, 2012, years and years later, my most nagging question is “What more have I got to give? Maybe I’ve given it all there is to give? Should I just quit and move on with my life? Should I stay and try to do my thing? What’s the point?”

 

Those years of blogging have given me so much, great friends, social relatioships, insights into things I’ve never dreamt of knowing, new experiences, a brand new lease for life. But it had also given me enemeies, heartache, tears, ulcers, anxiety, and deep profound sadness. Especially when you realize that people on the blogsphere are basically the same people surrounding you in real life, only masked by a nickname partially hiding their identites. Bullies who go out of their way to make sure they break your spirits, thieves and copycats who have no shame stealing your content and parading it as their own, people who make sure to exclude you because they can and they will, others that can see injustice with their own eyes, and allow it to happen just because its beneficial to their gain. Quitting because of them is as good as quitting on life itself, after all, every one who didn’t hide in in his cave throughout history have been subjected to similar occurances, its human race’s nature. If life give you lemons, you don’t commit suicide, you make lemonade out of them, and make it extra sweet too.

 

But…

 

I believe you quit when you can no longer deliver. When your posts are as boring as a lecture in physics, when your pictures pathetic and looks like they’ve been taken with a polaroid from the 80′s, when your ideas are as stale as cigarrete smoke, when your template is as old as a moth eaten tapestry hung in a run down restaurant, when you see that you cannot turn things around and move out of the rut you have, when the dashboard of yours is as empty as a haunted house, void of joy and laughter. Maybe then, its time to bid the crowds adieu and take your last bow, wave good buy while someone still knew your name.

 

Am I tired? Hell, yes. Will my quitting make others happy? I can give you a couple of names that would whoop in joy and distribute noon, I hope there aren’t more. Have I reached the end of the road? Given this all my might? I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t be writing this post. What I know for sure is that the day I decide to quit, I’m going to hang my boots quietly and simply stop publishing new posts, a clean cut and no turning back.

 

Fellow bloggers who still blog, why are you still doing it, when will you stop?

 

Fellow bloggers who did quit, if  you still read out blogs, what made you realize its time to go?