July 1st marked two years since I started ribbonrx.com. A lot of bloggers call that a Blogiversary, which I suppose is just as good a term as any!

In the wee hours of July 1, 2016 I tentatively published a brief post explaining what the name ribbonrx means. Later that same day, I published my first full-length blog post as the first in a three-part series describing my diagnosis and battle with endometriosis.

Not an Anniversary, a Blogiversary!

For my First Blogiversary on July 1, 2017, I wrote a post explaining the origin story of ribbonrx.com. When July 1st rolled around this year, I knew it was a date of some significance in my life. But for the life of me, I couldn’t recall why.

Was it because it was Canada Day? No, you idiot, you’re not Canadian.

Was it because that’s the day brand new doctors start their residencies? Perhaps in the past when you still worked at a teaching hospital and the date made you want to cry. But you don’t work anymore, you idiot.

Was it because it was the first day of a new month and you got to choose your monthly pick from Book of the Month? Hmm…a reasonable guess. But no.

It was only when I went into my Facebook memories that I saw the above-mentioned origin story posted on my timeline from 2017 and remembered. So I reread that post the other night when it finally dawned on me that yes, July 1st is a date of some significance in my life.

Blogging with a Foggy Brain

Unfortunately, this last year of blogging has not been up to my standards. With my brain fog due to POTS getting worse, writing is a tremendous challenge. My short-term memory is abysmal. We’re not talking 50 First Dates here, but I can’t focus long enough to get any decent posts written. That’s why so many of my posts this year are monthly book reviews. I just copy and paste the format from one month to the next and fill in the blanks.

It’s even worse when my social anxiety starts talking. This mental health issue, which I’ve been suffering from for roughly 24 years, convinces me on a daily basis that no one cares about my writing. And the reason no one cares is because my writing is awful. Besides, no one is interested in what I’m writing about anyway, so why bother writing anything?

To be honest, it was actually much easier to blog before I switched to a self-hosted site. Before I knew about SEO and readability. Before I had to start reformatting my posts to improve those scores to get my posts to rank in search engines. That’s not something many bloggers really need to care about. But since I’m trying to raise awareness of chronic illnesses, I need to do everything I can to get my posts out there into the public view. Still, it’s all made the whole writing process even more difficult. I can no longer sit down and plunk out a blog post in half an hour.

Stats on my Second Blogiversary

Of course, I need to do a stats check so I have something to look back on to measure my little blog’s growth! What makes this a bit tricky this year is when I switched to a self-hosted site in August 2017, I lost all of my stats up to that point. (Boy, am I really glad I wrote some of them down!) I therefore have no exact number of how many hits I had in July 2017.

• Total number of posts: 311
• Total number of hits: 74,772 + approximately 2,000-3,000 from July 2017, so roughly 77,000
• Total number of followers: 390
• Most popular post between July 1, 2017 and July 1, 2018: Six Things I Wish I’d Known About Endometriosis (3,262 hits since being published on August 28, 2017)
• Total number of countries that have visited the blog since August 2017: 114
• Country with the most hits between July 1, 2017 and July 1, 2018 (excluding the U.S.): Australia wins again! (2,348 hits) 🇦🇺 

Thank you to all my followers for helping to make this blog what it is. As someone who is unemployed and never leaves the house anymore, your comments and views mean the world to me. Perhaps this next year of blogging will be better.

💛ribbonrx