One of us has to mention it, might as well be me: Comments matter to me. Not as much as they used to, not in the way they might, but they matter. I work alone, and I spend a lot of time alone every day, so getting feedback on blog posts helps me feel like I’m not, as they say, quacking into the void.

Comments are not oxygen, though. The fire doesn’t die out if it’s denied commentary.

Some comments are empty calories, besides, useful for making the blog look lively but not for feeding the part of me that eats feedback. And that’s fine. As a freelancer, one must feed that part of one’s self on one’s own. Put another way, I’ve got to make my own rain. The blog post itself must satisfy me. Blogging in search of comments is like baiting a trap, and that’s fine if you’re a Gawker site, phrasing headlines to spark commentary, but I don’t get paid by the hit and I don’t have food to spare for mousetraps. I eat that bait before the trap is ever set.

I like to think that blogging somehow feeds you, the dear reader, who stopped by looking for a nosh or was grazing through your RSS reader, even if what I serve you is just an amuse-bouche (I looked it up), delicate and fatty and looking small on the plate.

The truth of it, though, is that blogging must feed the blogger. Writers are backwards creatures; we create food to feel fed. Ideally, this is like a chef who feels sated preparing a plate for a guest, but we can’t count on that. The writer can’t count on being read, and so he can’t feed his ego on other people’s clean plates and dirty napkins. Isn’t it enough that we can hardly feed our mouths? No, if we wait for feedback to feed us, we’ll starve mentally as well as bodily. We must put out our words, eat our own mistakes and triumphs, and put out better words, even if no commentary comes back from the Internet. If the food we set out for you rots and spoils, then we must set out more food, and more, and more.

My traffic data suggests that not many of you are reading this — fewer than once before, even — but only a tiny percentage of you comment. Until I stopped to consider my own reading-to-commenting ratio, this bothered me. But I read many more blog posts than I comment on, and I try to avoid leaving empty-calorie comments when I leave comments at all. I trust that other bloggers feel fed by their own writing, as I do by reading it.

For a long time this made me a hypocrite, and that’s just how that goes. I figured that a comment from me that amounted to “I read this!” was, to continue the metaphor, the equivalent of listening to me chew and slurp. It’s enough that the plate is clean, isn’t it? Do you really need to hear me eat? You don’t want to hear that.

So now I trust that you’ve read this the same way that I trust bloggers I read to know that they’re being read. We have to trust each other, us the readers and us the writers, because there just isn’t time for anything else. We’re all of us writers now, and we’re all in each others’ audience, and there are only so many hours in the day.

Put another way, I am growing fat on your silence.