Amy Lu's View

I just had a blog fail.

Okay, “fail” is probably a little dramatic, but I definitely committed a blog blunder. 

What, you may be wondering, did I do? Did I publish something insensitive that might get me in trouble with people I work with, or worse yet, something that would get me in trouble with Chad?

No, but I did blog about a topic I’ve already blogged about. And I don’t mean I just revisited familiar content territory– I knowingly and unapologetically often write about running, drinking, StanLee, drumming, etc., so that’s just a given (I only have so many life experiences to draw on). 

I usually do a search of my old blog posts to make sure that I’m not writing about exactly the same thing, or if I am, that I at least include an acknowledgement that I’m writing about something again. I often even include links back to previous posts. My librarian mojo shines through and I cite myself. 

This was a blunder because I unknowingly blogged about a very specific topic–letter writing–that I wrote about just a few months ago. On March 16 of this year (my last blog post before this,) I published the post “Boxful of Letters” and on September 4, 2021, I published “Wait a Minute, Mr./Ms./Mx. Postperson.” (Is it possible to plagiarize myself?) 

Okay, these posts were actually six months apart, but I don’t blog all that often, so six months isn’t very long in blog time. AND I not only wrote about the same topic, but the same incident–going through old letters I found while cleaning out some of our junk. AND…this is the worst part…I used the exact same photo to illustrate both posts.

If it wasn’t for this photo faux pas, I might just be able to shrug this off without mention. (No, I’m NOT going to post the photo again!) Afterall, letter writing is a big topic, and the format of the posts are definitely different, with the most recent cleverly written in the style of a letter. That one is part of my “Frog and Toad Challenge” and the older one isn’t. 

And good news/bad news–no one seemed to notice (which yes, probably means very few people are reading my blog). I even got more comments (as in any comments) when I shared my recent blog post on Facebook. So maybe the second exploration of this topic was more in engaging in some way, so worth a revisit? 

I do, after all, contradict myself in these posts, in one saying “Maybe people feel safer or bolder when expressing themselves in a letter, as it is a solitary experience–you can’t see the other person’s reactions and they can’t interrupt you,” and in the other, “Maybe we can be more vulnerable in letters?” Or perhaps that’s just two different ways of exploring the same idea, which is actually kind of cool. I admit, I like seeing how September 2021 Amy and March 2022 Amy compare. Maybe this blogging about the same thing on a six month cycle could be a worthy intentional practice?

But as I clearly did not intend to post about letter-writing twice in one year, I feel I need to own my mistake and examine it for any life lessons. Why did I do this? Is my memory that bad? Was I/am I drinking that much? Am I so frazzled and disorganized that I just don’t know what I’m doing?

Or…worse yet…HAVE I JUST RUN OUT OF ANYTHING TO BLOG ABOUT?

These are probably all contributing factors, and they are all rather disconcerting, but I am obviously worried about not having anything to blog about. 

Which is another reason I decided to blog about this blog embarrassment–I can’t pass up on content! (Yes, stealing this idea from the podcast TBTL in case anyone recognizes this). How meta is blogging about how my lack of content leads to more blog post content!

As long as I’m willing to blog about the silly things I do and goofy mistakes I make, I’ll never run out of things to blog about. 

And I think I’m just going to stop worrying about content recycling–afterall, if I can’t remember or keep track of what I write about, it’s not that likely that anyone else will be able to (or care to). Please consider this a blanket disclaimer that from here on anything you read in my blog is something I’ve probably already written about. Perhaps it will just be presented in a wittier or more inightful way.

Recycling, even content recycling, is good for the environment, right?