why blog?

although i haven't been blogging much in the past week, i have both been thinking about it and reading about it--here and here.  and reading has me thinking about what blogging has meant to me over the past nearly a year (although i created this blog back in 2004, i didn't really start using it 'til late 2007). it has been a creative and emotional outlet. it has been a way to ensure that i write something every day, as i transitioned to a job where writing was my work. it has been a healing process. a place where i work out thoughts and emotions. a place where i record experiences, preserve memories. a place where i leave some small pieces of myself...a footprint, if you will (better than leaving fragments in a mirror, don't you think?).

it has surprised me that it has turned out to be a social space because i really, sincerely started it for me and only me (and even had it closed initially). but it's become a place where i have found new friends all over the world. people who i have things in common with and who interest me. i think when i started i didn't imagine an audience at all, i was blogging for myself and for my sanity. it was a different way of keeping the journal that i've always kept. a less messy, morbidly personal way of doing so, as my handwritten journals can be SERIOUSLY navel gazing (i know, i'm indulging a bit of that at the moment), to the point of nausea. and i also repeat myself. a lot. i hope i do less of that here.

i have no desire to blog on the scale of andrew sullivan or matt drudge or ariana huffington , tho' i enjoy their blogs. for me, it's totally fine to have a network of people whose blogs i read and leave comments on and who occasionally stop by to read me. it feels hyggeligt that way. (hyggeligt is that danish word that they always translate as cozy, but which encompasses so much more than that word does in english.) it's a sense of an intimate community that i enjoy. i find inspiration in the thoughts and creations on the blogs i read. and i imagine that will continue, even as blogs evolve and change. i love the personal nature of them--the insight into someone else's life and thoughts and creativity.

another of the things i love about blogging is my monthly ritual of printing my month's entries and putting them into a lovely binder. i love that they print in reverse chronological order--it's like knowing the end already from the beginning. i love looking back at where i was (both literally with all my travel) and philosophically over the past month. or paging through previous months and seeing how my thoughts and moods have changed and evolved.

having studied literature for years (and gathered a couple of degrees related to it), i have always been interested in genre. i think the blog is an interesting and emerging genre in its own right--part diary, part gossip column, part self-help, part journalism, part storytelling. it's immediate and intimate. it can be confused and disorganized or poetic and lyrical. it's ever-shifting, yet always personal.  i love it and i intend to keep doing it.  like leaving footprints in the sand....