depression

As I said in my last post, the lam­p­work­ing com­mu­nity and my place in it has a lot to do with my cur­rent state of mind. Last year I started the Glass Haven as a response to what I thought was what peo­ple were say­ing about the exist­ing forums:

• The Big Forum (BF) is too big, too snarky, and has a ridicu­lous signal/noise ratio and way too much drama.
• The Old Forum (OF) is not very friendly (they ran off the BF peo­ple) and a wasteland.
• The Hos­tile Forum (HF) had got­ten, well, really really hos­tile and full of drama as well.

Peo­ple were say­ing that they wanted a friendly place to talk lam­p­work­ing and hang out, one that was mod­er­ated just enough so that you could freely express your­self as long as it was done in a civ­i­lized man­ner. They wanted a place where you weren’t going to be viciously attacked just for say­ing some­thing that some­one else dis­agreed with, a place where name-calling and gra­tu­itous insults weren’t allowed, a drama-free zone.

So I set up the Glass Haven. Peo­ple came, for a while. But after six months or so, the traf­fic started to dwin­dle, and by now is down to a slow crawl. So now it’s a catch-22 sit­u­a­tion — I’ve been told by a num­ber of for­mer reg­u­lars that they don’t visit because it’s slow and there’s not that much to talk about, but it’s slow because peo­ple aren’t vis­it­ing and talk­ing!? Hel-LO!!!? Tell me, just what am I sup­posed to do about that? Talk to myself all the time?

Instead, they spend their time at BF and HF, and they are still grip­ing about those forums’ same old flaws. I feel like a lot of the peo­ple who claimed to want a friendly drama-free zone to actu­ally dis­cuss glass really weren’t telling the truth, and that the drama is a huge part of the draw of those two forums. Peo­ple say they don’t want it but they are almost like junkies.

I’ve invested a crazy amount of time over the past four­teen months in TGH, and now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if it’s worth­while to con­tinue, or to scale back, or just let it go. It makes me want to cry (or maybe throw up) when I think about all that I’ve put into it, at the expense of my own lam­p­work­ing and grow­ing my own busi­ness. The rather small amount of money I’ve invested isn’t the issue — it’s all about the TIME.? With all that time I could have been melt­ing glass, exper­i­ment­ing with new tech­niques, tak­ing pho­tographs, get­ting my own works out there on the Web and adver­tis­ing them so peo­ple would be aware of them and BUY them. But here I am, frus­trated and disappointed.

I know bet­ter than to make any major deci­sion in the throes of a depres­sive episode, so nothing’s going to hap­pen right away.? But still…