Feeling like you're failing when you're not: political blogger edition

I was all geared up to write a blog post about how I had ended up writing a dating blog (by someone who hardly ever goes on dates!) and how this was originally intended to be all political and gender activism and stuff and now look at me...

So, I decided to get some figures to back up my argument. I decided to have a look at how few posts focussing on politics I had written in the past year and then do that whole "woe is me" thing.

Thing is, it didn't quite work out that way. In the past year or so, I wrote about 200 posts; in the same time, there were 23 posts labelled with the "politics" tag, although one of those was an episode of Cyborg Sleeps, so probably not about real world politics as such. That's roughly 1 in every 9 posts was labelled "politics". The thing is, a lot of posts that aren't to do with protests, campaigns or electoral politics, still relate to gender and sexual politics through the whole gender and sex thing - about which I write fairly frequently and a fair amount of that writing makes some form of political point or other relating to those topics. So in fact, it might be 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 posts. By comparison, there were 40 posts tagged "dating" (and generally, even tangentially related topics got a "dating" tag), which is exactly 1 in 5. So the best guess is that I've been posting about equally about the originally-intended topics for this blog, and about the more personal feelings I have about the world of dating (and it's possible that there is some overlap). It does rather leave the question of what the other 3/5 of my posts in the last 12 months were about, but frankly, that's not the point. The point is, in my mind I had the idea that my dating posts heavily outnumbered my politics and gender related posts, and at worst it's only a ratio of 2:1, and a fairer guess might be that they're evenly matched. So, why the big difference between perceptions and reality?

As mentioned, I started this blog to talk about sexual and gender politics, with a particular interest in kink, trans* issues and feminism. A few months after I started it in 2007 (it feels weird to think I've been doing this for nearly 5 years now!) I entered severe episode of depression and made the decision to use this space to talk about those personal issues as well, and the blog has more-or-less had that shape ever since, with the balance between political and personal shifting according to the shape of what's going on politically, and what's going on for me - my number of available "spoons" also dictating to a certain extent which topics I took on at which times. But in the back of my mind there has always been that feeling that this is "supposed" to be a political blog.

Since May this year, I have been exploring in a somewhat cack-handed way the world of dating, "pick-up artistry", and so on, seeking some kind of structure and principles that gel well with my personality and my political convictions re: feminism, gender equality and all that stuff. And, of course, being kinky an' all. Naturally, that exploration has been recorded regularly on this site.

So, each "dating" post seemed like it wasn't what this blog is "supposed" to be about, and sticks in my mind as an aberration; but each political post has seemed like a normal (and therefore less significant) event. So, I remember all the dating posts and ignore or forget all the political ones (I honestly thought in the past 6 months I'd only done about 5, and it's at least twice that). So I feel like I'm "failing", because I'm doing stuff I shouldn't, instead of stuff I should.

Which is, of course, baloney - not only is it perfectly okay to be writing about the dating issues (if only because, hello, gender and sex issues?!) - but also, I have been writing a reasonable amount about politics, too. It is true that my dating posts in total over 4.5 years numbered 113 to date, of which 40 came in the last 12 month, leaving 73 in the previous 3.5 years, but when you work it out, that's actually still roughly 1/3 of the posts in the previous 2/9 of the lifetime of the blog, which isn't that far off! On politics, there is more of an imbalance: it's closer to 1/8 in the past 2/9 of the blog's lifetime. However, when you run the numbers through a calculator, it turns out that on average I've been posting 3.3 posts per month on politics in the last year, whereas on average across the previous 3.5 years, I have been posting roughly 3.1 "politics" posts per month - in other words, the difference is about one post every month. Since I'm blogging about 16 times a month in total, that's not a big difference!

It's very easy to trick yourself into thinking you're doing more (or less) than you really are. I have felt a certain amount of downturn in my political blogging since the end of 2010: the all-out assault on the poor and vulnerable by the coalition government just beat the fight out of me (I ran out of spoons to keep up the struggle). But really, I have not been as lax as that made me feel. I have not been failing, I have just been expecting to fail, and I have been selectively remembering things in a way that matches that expectation. Checking the figures as I have done here, is a really good wake-up call. This is why I like SMART targets for my New Year's Resolutions, for example.

In the Tao of Pooh, there's a line about asking yourself, when you say, "I never get anything right" or similar things, "Is that true - or even possible?" This post is about asking, "Is that true?" when you think you're failing.