Blogging is a strange endeavor.
We live in a society that values privacy. We hoard it. We hold it sacred.
And we value financial productivity. We like to have some type of monetary or material reward when we put in vast amounts of time into some endeavor.
And we value the legitimizing force of authority — we like knowing our information was vetted by some content editor or copy writer.
And then there’s the blog. We typically get very little in terms of monetary reward. We stand on our own two feet without the weight of a publisher behind us. And we forgo a certain amount of privacy in the areas we choose to write about.
We give of ourselves through our words. We share our experiences, our thoughts, and a sometimes substantial part of ourselves.
So why would anyone do it?
I can’t answer for anyone else, but for me, I do it because it’s the only way I know to make sense out of the world.
We live in very fast times. The vast majority of us have too much to do in too little time. We can spend days and weeks and years being propelled forward through life by situations and events around us without ever really taking the time to stop and ask ourselves why. Our lives become about doing rather than about being.
And blogging gives me a little opportunity to remedy that in my own life. It gives me a space to contemplate. Having readers holds me accountable.
I guess somewhere deep inside I have this fear that I’ll look back on my life fifty years from now and wonder where it all went, and even worse, wonder why I let it go the way that I did. Writing allows me time to reflect on the direction it is going and why.
And then there are my girls.
Lord willing, they will have me in their lives for many years. But no matter how many years we have, they won’t have a whole lot of lasting memories of who I was when they were little. They might remember feelings and brief memories, but they won’t really know who I was when I was their everything.
And I want them to know me.
When they are sitting in their own living rooms with a screaming infant, I want them to know that I faced similar struggles. When they are cuddled up with their little ones reading books, feeling so much love they feel they are going to explode, I want them, I need them, to know that someone felt the same way about them.
And so I want them to know me, but not really in an effort to be known, but rather so they know that they are not alone and they aren’t the first and only when times get tough. It’s a lonely world, and this is my feeble attempt to make it less lonely for them as they travel through it.
And I think most mom bloggers describe their blog as a love letter to their children, and so I guess I’ll just be redundant and supremely unoriginal as I say the same.
We give our kids everything we have. Our time, our money, our attention, our affection. We give them the best years of our lives. And this is my way of giving them just a bit more — a piece of my soul. I want them to be able to look back on these words and know just how special they are in my eyes.
The world is full of people who will line up to tell them what is wrong with them. Who will hold a mirror up to their faults. Tear them down and refuse to build them back up. And this is my small place to counter that. To build them up. To show them how precious they are in my eyes. A permanent fixture to all that I believe them to be.
And I don’t need a blog to do all of this. I’m sure there are other ways.
But a part of me just feels more alive when I’m writing. It gives me joy. It invigorates me. It’s a high. It gives me something to be excited about and to work towards. And I guess perhaps there doesn’t really need to be any greater reason than that.
I blog because I like to.