Losing Followers

A few weeks ago, I discovered that I had lost a follower on my blog. My reaction was very calm, very low-key. It went something like this:

Me: Oh, DEAR GOD! NOOOOO!! The HUMANITY of it all! Why did I lose a follower? What did I do wrong? (Gasp gasp gasp) I've lost the will to blog! It's too late for me, but SAVE YOURSELVES!

Even though I only lost one follower, it did bum me out for a little while. It's always a nice ego boost when I get a new follower. I'm grateful for the fact that there's at least a handful of nice people out there who are willing to read what I'm writing. So I was caught off guard when I found out that someone decided to stop reading my blog. Was it because I wasn't following that person's blog? Was it because I wasn't posting as often? Did that person find one of my posts offensive? Was he or she offended by my belief that Britney Spears deserves a Grammy? (FYI: She does.)

I know that losing a follower isn't the worst thing in the world. But it does sting a little. For just a moment, it made me question whether my blog was good enough, whether I as a writer was good enough. It also made me wonder if I should be blogging about more "interesting" topics, like maybe instead of writing about my neighbors or guys who take their pants off on the train, I should write more posts about online dating, especially since those usually seemed to get the most comments.

But ultimately, losing a follower wasn't enough to make me stop blogging. For me, blogging is a good way to motivate me to write regularly; I've definitely made a lot more progress in my fiction-writing since I started writing. And even though I do write with an audience in mind, at the end of the day I'm going to blog about whatever's on my mind that day, and hopefully someone out there will want to read it. If I keep thinking about pleasing an audience when I write, I'd probably never write anything.

I think it's like writing fiction. I was always taught that you're supposed to write about what's important to you, rather than write about what's popular or what's trendy. And even if it's not what everyone else is writing about, there's always the possibility that you can connect with someone through your writing who feels the same way that you do. And that, to me, is part of what's rewarding about writing. It's always been one of the good parts about reading, to read something by a good writer and get that thrill of recognition, to think, "That's exactly what I feel!" Another good thing is helping people see things in a different light, so that even if they didn't see things your way before, they came to understand it better once they read your writing.

So even though it isn't fun to lose readers, at the same time it'd be even worse if I gave up writing altogether just because some people don't want to read my stuff anymore. I can't even imagine what my life would be like if I stopped writing, because being a writer is the one thing I've always been sure of.

What about you? Have you ever lost a follower? How did it make you feel?