My Corner Online

 

Done fighting to fit in

 

It is amazing how one little thing that someone does can have such a huge impact on someone's previous pains. This time it feels like the piece of hay on the camels back. I want to delete the entire website. I'm tired of trying to fit in around the digital scrapbooking world. I'm tired of trying to be accepted. I'm tired of trying to please everyone and to fight to get people to use my tutorials. Shouldn't it come naturally for people to share them? But because I have a website that might be considered competition, I am not welcome at digital scrapbooking sites. I am judged as trying to promote myself. Well, shouldn't these sites be welcoming my resources instead of shunning them away? Shouldn't these other sites be sharing my resources for others? I never see any of them doing it. I have never since 2005 seen any of them doing it. Instead they watch me and take my ideas and then remake them as their own.

Yesterday I was visiting a The Lilypad where I had previously been welcome to share links at, although I had not shared many and had just participated as a person in general and purchased a lot from the store. I really like a lot of the designs in the store. I made a comment and someone asked me about it and asked me to send them a private message. I tried hard to send the private message with a link to my page to answer the question, but I kept receiving a blanket error message. I tried for at least 15 minutes. I finally gave up and posted a message to the person's wall. Later I received a blanket email indicating that I should respect their policies not to post outside links.

This really hurts every time it happens. It has happened more times than I can count. I feel judged that I am being disrespectful. I feel judged that I am there just to market myself. To me it feels like an attack on my character. How could they think that this is the kind of person I am? How could they not know that I am just there to help people when they ask? How can they not know after all these years that I am just in it for the hobby and not here to make money?

Anyone who has a gift for teaching and is a teacher at heart knows how hard it is not to help someone when asked or to help someone when they see someone needing help learning. My website was born out of this helpful nature. When I was in a yahoo group I got tired of answering the same questions over and over, so I began typing the answers and putting them out on the website and then linking people to the answer rather than spending a lot of time retyping over and over. That is how the first tutorials started and then it kept growing. It is no different now, in that rather than typing out answers, I merely point people to the answer. Yet in the digital scrapbooking world I am not welcome to do so. Rather it is seen as competition to get people to come to my site.

You know, I can walk into Lowe's and not be able to find what I want and have a discussion with the clerk on where I might find what I'm looking for, and be recommended to go down the street to Menards. I could walk into Menards and have the same situation happen and be recommended to go to Lowe's. I can walk into Walmart and not find something I'm looking for and be recommended to go to Schnucks. The same thing would happen vice versa. There is such a thing as goodwill in a business. However it does not exist in the digital scrapbooking world. They have a very tainted business philosophy. Partly it is due to people who do abuse marketing. There are always the few bad apples that ruin it for the rest of us. However I would think after all this time my reputation would be known as not being one of those bad apples.

I think to myself, would anybody really miss all these tutorials if I took them down? What am I doing spending all of my time and resources doing this? If people really needed them, then others in the digital scrapping world would share them naturally. They don't. They never have. They never will.

I feel very used. I feel that I have been used since day one. I feel like all of my time since 2005 has been a waste. Should I keep doing this in continuing to allow wounds to be opened again? Why have I not learned my lesson long ago?

I think of an analogy of birds that fit in together and fly in a formation. Isn't this the way God created us? Isn't it natural for us to all fit in as in creation? I sort of feel like one of Job's friends (in the Bible) who used creation to explain to Job why things were not right. The friends theory was incorrect. Just as this theory is incorrect. Fitting in is for the birds. Not mankind.

1/23/2016