Just another area of insecurity

This morning at the mall I watched people, mainly women (though the comment is not intended to be misogynistic) with cell-phones stuck in their ears. I wondered why. They were only going shopping. Why would they need to be chatting with someone? Can't they leave friends or family for a half hour without checking in? Are they so afraid of being cut off? Of being rejected? That's scary.

Leesa recently raised a point in her invariably well-considered, thoughtful and often witty blog the other day, about Blogger etiquette. We write our blogs, and we hope to elicit comment. We like it when our friends connect, and we especially like comment from bloggers whose blogs we genuinely admire -- and there are some mighty fine ones out there. So, you write your blog, and somebody responds. The question Leesa raised is, do you respond to them? Do you respond in your own blog commentary column? Do you go to their blog and make a comment on one of theirs, just to touch base? Do you do so in the hope they will keep coming back to yours? I love it when somebody in their own comments column responds to my comment. Yet, I must confess, I am sometimes remiss in responding to theirs in mine. I mean, do people check back? I do. But, maybe I'm neurotic. Maybe I'm afraid of being rejected. I've seen blogs in which people get right hostile because nobody had responded to something they had written, and they let their displeasure be known in a subsequent blog.

You see, this all becomes an area of fear of rejection, and it adds another dimension to this primal fear in our lives. We went through it in school. We believed that everybody was more popular than we are. That everybody is having a wonderful time, while we are sitting home alone popping corn for ourselves and watching TV with Mom and Dad.

Once, when my stepdaughter was about 14, and at a loose end because all her friends had something happening on a Saturday night -- emphasis on 'all' her friends, or so she believed -- and she had nothing happening. My wife and I decided to take in a movie. We asked her if she would like to come along, since I knew it was one she had wanted to see. She grudgingly said that she would. She came with us. She actually ducked down when we passed friends of hers on the street. She could not be seen with us because, you see, she had been rejected. I asked her if she really thought all of her friends were out doing fabulous things that evening. She replied that she did. When we got to the theatre and purchased tickets, she immediately parted our company and went and sat on the far side, by herself, just so she wouldn't be seen with us, such was her shame at her perceived rejection.

Are there bloggers that go through the same thing? Can we take this pressure? Should there be a 12-Step program for blog rejection obsession? Or, should we simply advise bloggers to just carry on, write another blog, and simply grin and bear it when they receive that old zero comments at the bottom of the blog. I know it hurts, but I think we can do it.