According to the article,
many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world.
Yesterday I remembered something that I might want to blog about. The problem was, I wasn't absolutely sure I haven't already blogged about it. (I keep telling people that my brain worked much better than this when I was younger!)
And so I picked the label that I thought I would most likely have used if I had blogged about this memory, and started reading. I didn't find the memory, but I sure did find happiness. As I read each post labelled "my cute kids" I found my smile growing bigger and bigger.
I am a very nostalgic person. I love pictures and I love scrapbooks and I love slideshows and anything that reminds me of happy moments. I love that for almost 10 months I have recorded moments of family fun and family not so fun.
I love that I have a record of thoughts and ideas that have been on my mind. I love that the process of taking a thought from my mind and putting it into (relatively) coherent written words has forced me to think more clearly and improved my writing. I love that sometimes what I've thought & written has been meaningful to people that I care about who read my blog, and that sometimes you've responded with your own thoughts and feelings that have blessed my life.
Jason asked me the other day if I keep a journal. For many years I have considered my email a truer journal of my life than any journal I ever kept. Instead of a repeated and annoying "today was ok....", my email conversations tracked what I was thinking, what I was experiencing, what I was learning.
A blog is almost all of that, plus pictures too. No wonder I love it!
Posts
THANK YOU! I get so tired of the whole comment paranoia/egotism that goes on. I write for personal enrichment. I read for personal enrichment. Sometimes I comment, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I get comments, sometimes I don't. Either way, I'm still writing. Either way, every time I go back and read something I wrote a while back, I am so happy to have the memory or thought recorded that it doesn't really matter what everyone else thinks of what I've put out there for posterity. So thank you.
ReplyDeleteDitto. :) I blogged back when nobody even knew I blogged, but it's so fun to go back and see what my life was like when I was 15.
ReplyDeleteI do think the comment thing is interesting. I have to rethink my feelings about it from time to time. Sometimes I will write something that is random, off the cuff, and a lot of people will comment. Sometimes I will write something that I've put a lot of thought and effort into and no one will comment.
ReplyDeleteJana, who writes the Meanest Mom blog, is a good friend of ours. She moved into our ward when our triplets were born and helped us out a ton. There were a few minutes that I was a little jealous of her "success" as a blogger. And then I realized that was actually not what I was after and so I calmed down.
The funny thing is, even non-blog people are conflicted about the comments. When I wrote that post a few weeks ago about hymn arrangements (something I've thought about for a long time) I asked my music friend's permission before I posted his arrangement. We emailed a few times along the lines of "I still think you're wrong" and "you don't understand what I'm saying." He never reads blogs, but of course he looked at this post. And later he said something about "no one even commented" like that was a measure of something.
I guess it was a measure of something. A measure of busy-ness in that moment, or general disinterest, or not enough time to listen to the music in order to make a comment, etc. But we don't know exactly what it is a measure of, so all we know for sure is that no one commented.
I was still glad I wrote the post. ;) (And, for the record, I still think he is wrong.)