Confessions of a Blank Box, Blinking Cursor Addict

Or, a Long-Short History of Blogging

In honor of my 300th entry writing as Saul Good and Co., I thought I'd riff a little about how I came to blogging, what it's added to my life, and why I can't seem to stop. 

It all started in 2001 - on break from my first year of grad school, I was working full-time, but missing the creative rush from that insane first semester and wanted to keep my recently re-acquired brain muscles from atrophying over the summer. I knew someone who had started an anonymous, free-form diary online, something that to me was brand new and mindblowing. I decided to give it a go, but I didn't tell anyone but Mike about it, and I used it as a place to venture out, experiment a little. I didn't have a real sense of what I was getting into, nor did I expect a response or following from other writers, but I did get a surprisingly good-sized one, and over the years I became part of quite a community. It changed my life in more ways than I can count, and maintaining that space gained me the majority of my solid, long-term adult friendships. After awhile it inevitably got less anonymous, and I password-protected it for privacy reasons. I have no regrets about anything that I wrote, but there's plenty in there that most people in my life don't need to know about, so it is locked forever and ever (or until the service finally, finally disappears into the ether) and I'm the only one with the code. 

I'm not saying it's not chock full of embarrassing content, hack work, and TMI, but mostly I'm proud of it. And to have a record of an entire decade, to have evidence of that time in my life when I went through a million billion changes and so much happened in history and I grew as a writer and cemented myself as a person, it's personally valuable.  It seemed like a fitting, natural (if bittersweet) stopping point when I closed it after HR was born.

2010 - Turns out I missed it so much I started a new blog, Joyberrypie, after the baby was born and I went back to work. There was no plan going in, just another space to scratch my public writing itch, but it shaped itself into a chronicle of  new motherhood. It seems too soon to me still to revisit that blog incarnation, a lot of raw feelings, including the hard shock of my best friend's untimely death, but there's some good stuff in there. As my boy grew, though, I outgrew that space with relative speed, it didn't feel like home anymore. I needed fresh inspiration. And hence...

2013 - (until the internet ends/I get burned out again) - this right 'chere. I like it here. As a writing-person, I'm trying not to keep treading the same ground, dwelling in comfortable things. I want to challenge myself more, take some risks. That's why I don't write as much. It's not important to me any more to get something out there every single day as it is to feel like I've created something of substance, or just created something. Chronicling the details of my everyday life no longer holds interest for me. Not that those won't creep in, just that I am less inclined to do, say, weekend recaps which were a staple of my other blogs. I'm not a Kardashian. Nobody cares about my damn minutiae. But sometimes I have things to say, and I think they are things that other people might relate to or want to discuss and that's why I put them out there. Sometimes things fall flat. Sometimes I go back and cringe. But it's OK with me. 

Blogging, as a thing, peaked years ago. I know this. It's a dying ___ form. And I'm ok with that, because despite all my failed pitches to the HuffPo, I've never wanted to blog as a profession. Maybe an essayist. Maybe memoir. It's safe to say at this point that I'll never not need to write. But on my terms as much as possible. I've never wanted to be beholden to sponsors, or do giveaways, or do something staged just to earn my lettuce. It's not like I don't think that this is "real" writing, but I know it's not the same as having a deadline and going through an editorial process. If I can ever get that to happen, I'm all in for it. But what I do here, this is 100% for me. It's just my thing. I'm not much of a talker and writing about things and putting them out there helps me make sense of the world, of myself. After a lifetime of private paper journaling, which I still even do on occasion, the audience aspect has become something I crave. It holds me accountable. Even though I just talk about my feeeeeelings as much as I do in personal diary mode, I try really hard to give context to the feelings, shape them. I'm not trying to make them or myself relevant, exactly, it's just that I can't extricate all these feelings from my search for purpose and connection and universal truth. 

Not for nothing: of the thousands of times I've pressed that "publish" button, almost every single time, it's been from this seat right here. The room of my own I never realized I had. The great, unheralded perk of this job. It is totally weird and egregious that I've never properly appreciated that.

2008 (when I started taking pictures)

2016 (no end in sight)

In conclusion, please don't vote for Trump. 

Comments

[Jen]

I'm not into daily/weekend recaps anymore either. Nobody cares. I have no problem when people do that, and they can be interesting AT TIMES. But I feel like the bloggers who take the highlight reel type of approach are squandering their chance to really talk about stuff, to get beneath the surface. Not everyone can or wants to do that, but it's frustrating when I see how they could delve into something meaty and it's glossed over in favor of photos of their weekend. To each his own, but I'm glad you get it!

[Dawn]

We have definitely evolved since our humble beginnings!