So, when I started this blog, I never expected to be read by much of anyone. My first couple of followers were people I knew and who, I presume, already had a pretty good idea of my thoughts … I was writing for myself more than anything, with a vague hope one day of getting something published. (I had a mildly disguised autobiographical novel I was working on and some lousy science fiction stories I was working on (and those that I had tried to get publish had simply gotten firm ‘noes’; I’ll be honest, most of my fiction, I fear, is hopelessly derivative or from such a skewed POV that who would want to read it anyway? (At some point, I’ll post a summary of some of them just to prove how uninteresting or unoriginal they really are!)
Anyway, I had a vague hope that someone or other might find my blog or some of the articles I’d submitted. I had hopes of making a tiny difference, a very tiny difference in terms of the situation of women, of Syrians, of sexual minorities … like maybe change one mind … and occassionally daydreaming of more (but knowing full well that real improvements and hopes for a beautiful democratic, free and prosperous Syria were probably more fantastic than some of the lousyscience fiction stories I’d begun; nothing was going to change here anytime soon. That was something you could be confident of.
Instead, I was wrong. What I had dreamed about and hoped for suddenly started seeming to be plausible: Arab people, first in Tunisia, then everywhere, were beginning to awaken and make their own history from the ground up. The world could be as amazing as I had dreamed … and like everyone else across the nation, my dreams suddenly became more realistic.
Sometime around then, I got a notification of a comment … from someone I didn’t know … I was excited … I saw a follower added who was a stranger … I was thrilled … then more and more …
And, of course, at the same time, the situation here was changing; the decades long freeze was over and things mattered once more. Now, all the ideas I have had bubbling in my head can be spilled forth and made to matter …
And as part of this, something amazing has happened: I started getting comments from all over the world, words of comfort and support, offers of help … sometimes from people I’ve long admired (my favorite novelist posted a comment … bloggers and journalists I admire have written me (though as yet I have not heard from my most favorite journalist!) … wow! I’m more than a little starry-eyed!)
But there’s also criticism … and, yeah, I read that too … one website has long comments claiming crazy things about me, one person attacks me for being anti-Alawi, another for not calling for slaughter of them …
I’m just trying to get by, y’know? Trying to explain things from one point of view and trying to make sense of what is happening … and maybe even have some small influence on events. I know what I want for my beloved bilad and maybe I can help it happen!
1 comments:
Haters gonna hate.
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