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It’s just me telling you sorry, no real blog post this Thursday. I let myself get behind (shocker) on travel prep and now I’m out of time and my flight is crackadawn Saturday and I have a work thing Friday night SO…I did not make time to do pictures and now I don’t have a real blog post for you.

But, I did want to talk about something a little bit. About blogging.

In the past few days, I’ve read such disheartening posts from two bloggers I’m really a fan of – one is a fashion blogger and the other…uhm, a horse blogger? Riding? Not sure what the term is, and anyway, to be clear, I follow her on Instagram not a blog, but that’s just fiddly details. It’s the same thing. They’re sharing on social media. With us. Sometimes it’s just how-to and what to do and look at this horse/dress/jump/haircut, etc. Sometimes they share of themselves. And that is the part that draws me in, that makes me feel like I know them, like I am friends with them. And I’ve spoken about that before.

But now…PEOPLE HAVE HURT MY FRIENDS. Yes, my “I Have Never Met Them In Real Life and Probably Never Will” social media friends, but still. Just like in the “real world,” there are icky people. People who go out of their way to be, at the very least, annoying…and sometimes downright mean, or worse, destructive. On social this may consist of snide comments…people can take words out of context (we know how easy that is to do, say, in a text, without seeing facial expression or hearing tone of voice) and get angry about  something and really run with it to an extreme. Bloggers are sometimes harassed by commenters, reputations can be trashed, etc. Things can get really ugly and hurtful. And then bloggers (aka PEOPLE) want to stop. To stop posting, stop sharing. Stop being our friends. The one young woman this has been happening to is so upset by it all, she’s pulling out of social media. A) She does a service to other riders and horse trainers when she shares her lovely gentle methods and now no one will be learning from her. B) It appears that she makes some degree of income from her Instagram posts and she will lose that, and we all know how life-changing a loss of income can be. She’s really shaken and upset by things people have been saying. She’s a young person and it’s such a shame that she’s having this negative experience when she’s just sharing good things. The other woman is older (not OLD, but an adult). And she’s not leaving social or blogging but…it’s just very upsetting to have people throw mud at you when you’re just trying to share…nice things!!! Ugh. I feel for both of them.  And for all the many people who have experienced things like this.

I feel fortunate that so far I’ve not had any really unpleasant experiences with my blog. I don’t know if it’s just cuz I’m still a “blog baby,” ha ha, or WordPress is really doing its job in keeping spammy comments out of sight. I hope I never do have to deal with these small ugly people…but I know it sort of goes with the territory as your numbers of followers/readers get higher.

And the flip-side of that is how grateful and appreciative  I am of the truly lovely people I have following my blog and commenting. I thank each of you for being kind and patient and understanding and complimentary and all the wonderful things that you are and say.

So, that’s all I have for you today. The next time you’ll hear from me I’ll be in…………

Didn’t think I was gonna spoil the surprise when I was this close, did you??