Why I Started
Why'd I decide to start a blog? Sure wasn't to be famous...
One of the blog posts that caught my attention from an old blog of mine was the response to the following prompt, probably from the WordPress prompt of the day.
What made you decide to start a blog? If you’ve blogged about this before, go back and read it. Is that still the reason? What’s changed?
November, 2011 Response
Why did I start blogging? Well, which blog are you talking about? I’ve sort of been doing this for years.
I had my first blog in high school, about 2001 or so. It was a LiveJournal because, well, that’s where all of the high schoolers went to pour out their souls back in the day. Plus, hey, it was free! And let you put a different user icon on every post!
That blog got started because I felt the need to share the intimate details of every day of my life. I didn’t really have a digital camera until 12th grade so photos were rarely included. Maybe a scanned in photo from a friend’s party. Generally, I blogged about how I wasn’t very popular, about how I like one guy or another, how much I liked marching band and quiz bowl and robotics. In short, I blogged about nothing important to anyone I wasn’t going to talk about all of it to, anyway. [I don’t even know if my parents knew I blogged back then. Probably for the best, if I really think about it.]
Then I got a Vox blog in 2005 or so (had it for six months the day the iPhone was first announced). There I blogged to be one of the cool kids on that site. It was very easy to include photos in your posts so I felt the need to include photos in every single post, though most were from stock photography websites. I don’t think I blogged about a single important thing other than how much I hating planning my wedding.
Then I came over here to WordPress in mid-2007 and, eventually, hit my stride. I started to write up my craft projects, talk about school and work and family, started to care, I guess. I’ve tried to care less about who reads my blog and more about what I want to blog about.
As I always joke, the reason I keep blogging is to my mom knows I’m alive and well and has a general idea of what’s going on with me. But, also, it’s because I know it’s good for me. I’m someone who’s always got a million things swirling around in her head and I always feel better when I can remove one or two of those pesky things and talk about it here. [Thankfully for you all, most of the craziest thoughts stay in my head or only get told to Matt. Like how I often wonder where people are going when I see them running to catch the Metro – are they really late or just impatient?]
So, yeah, that’s why I blog. To update my mom and to stay sane. Oh, and someday, I would like to be popular.
Answering for Now
I actually talked about this with my therapist (more on that some older time) at a session a few weeks back. I have a habit of logging on to my appointments then switching to another tab or doing something like winding yarn while I wait for her to join. She popped onto the call and I was busy typing away like crazy, I think it was my February book roundup. I explained, somewhat sheepishly, that I was writing a blog post and she asked me to tell her about more about.
I pointed out what I said all those years ago, that I've been a blogger for what seems like forever though I do so in fits and spurts. I blog to express myself in a more public way than my journal/diary and to share about things I like (books and travel, especially). I do it as an outlet, as a way to write whole sentences rather than bullets on Power Point slides or "Hi, you don't know me but I'm from <org> working for <person and title> and I need <big ask>." emails. I also write to keep people updated on my life, though I don't delude myself that I've got some huge user base (hello to my whopping * 2 * followers). I post a link to here from my Insta and Bluesky and people can choose to come read what I've written..or not. It's mostly about myself, at this point, not for some fame in any way, shape, or form.