What am I doing here?

It's a question that crops up from time to time:

Why do I spend the time and energy to blog?

Some days, the voice has a tinge of self-pitying doubt. These are days when I look and see that even though my site meter tells me that I've had several visitors in the last week, no one has left me a comment since forever (can you hear the 14 year old?). Do they not care? Is my writing that bad? Should I go hide by head under a blanket and never touch a keyboard again?

Fortunately, those times don't last long.

Other times, such as today, I am inspired to ask this question more intellectually, and then both the accompanying questions and the answers are much more pleasant.

I stumbled across an essay by Meredith Farkas, of Information Wants to Be Free, where she asks a similar question. She's looking at the issue of self-disclosure and social media, and wonders about her motivations when she does disclose personal information about herself. Farkas writes,

I notice that my blog started to get more personal as I started to connect more with real people online. I had a few regular readers and commenters whom I got to know and like, and I wanted to share things with them, both good and bad. Personal and professional, online and real world all seemed to blur together.

She finds herself in the position of knowing a lot about people she's never met in person, and of being completely involved in the dramas going on in their lives, because of reading their blogs. And lots of people know a lot about her, because of reading her blog. Boundaries get blurry. She thinks of them as friends, but does that make sense?

Another question Farkas poses is how much her self-disclosure has to do with ego. Is she telling personal information, for example job search woes, so that someone will leave an encouraging comment?

It's a fair question, and one I pose to myself. Of course it feels good to have someone comment. How great do you feel when a stranger notices and comments on your gorgeous new shoes? Great, you feel great. I think we all want to be noticed, and this only increases when something means a lot to you. If writing ~ blogging ~ is a passion, of course you will want people to appreciate the effort you put into it. The same goes for whatever you blog about. On some level you will want someone to comment on that recipe or picture or bit of unsolicited advice.

But I also think there is more to it than this, and I suspect it's a commonality with many of us who put a lot of care into what we write on our blogs, regardless of the size of our readership or the subjects we write about. The epiphany came to me as I was putting away dishes and thinking about writing this essay. I realized that lately when I'm working in the yard, at the library, puttering away my time on the water, or reading a good book, in part of my mind I am also thinking, "Is there something here that would be worth writing about? Is there something here that is interesting? What am I feeling at this very moment?"

For me, the great thing about blogging is the care I put into what I write, as much as how I write it. In short, I pay more attention to the good things going on around me. It becomes a sort of gratitude exercise or prayer, and consequently I get more out of what I'm doing and experiencing.

I've made a very conscious effort to focus on positives in this blog. Yes, there have been a couple of rants, but even the quest for joy must be done in moderation. And when I do feel a rant coming on, I try to think about it for a while and figure out a way to write about what is bothering me in a way that is thoughtful and constructive.

The key here is that the process of committing my thoughts to the blogosphere makes me pause, take stock, and look at the world around me ~ good and bad, profound and mundane ~ in a way that is more productive than I might otherwise have done. I want to make my blog a place that friends, family and strangers can visit and find something interesting, hopeful, peaceful or thought-provoking. I hope I succeed for those of you who read these words.

What sustains me through the comment droughts and self doubts is that even if no one else read this blog, the process of blogging is good. Somehow, making the blog worth visiting makes me feel the grace and goodness in my life as well. It's more powerful in this way than journaling, because journaling is private and blogging is emphatically not. When I've written a journal, I didn't ask myself, "what would my mother/lover/boss think of this?" because that person would not be reading my words. When I blog, I do think of these people, and a whole lot more, and evaluate how my words might impact them, for better or worse. But I don't think it's the same as self-censorship, because I've discovered that by caring about the impact of my words on others I actually like what I'm writing and thinking better as well.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't love to hear from you, whether we know each other outside of the blogosphere or not. Go ahead, leave a comment. It will make my day.

BTW: the lovely pic up top is from
www.publicdomainpictures.net