Why I blog

During my visit with her last month, my niece told me all about the Little Miss Perfect that lives inside her head. She tries not to listen to Little Miss Perfect because all she does is take all the fun away. She also correctly deduced that I have a Little Miss Perfect that lives inside my head.

I blog for me, because I like it. When I’m not trying to put the pressure on, I have a lot of fun with it. I love seeing my words and images up on the web. If absolutely nobody ever read my blog. I think I would still blog. I need a little creative outlet and I enjoy this way of expressing myself.

I also blog for my mental health. I always feel a little bit like an exhibitionist for blogging. However, I find that by exposing my thoughts, feelings and life, it makes me feel a little more sure of myself. Getting feedback from others is always reassuring. Often by blogging about something, it forces me to clarify exactly what I think or how I feel about something. It also forces me to listen to how I sound and to evaluate the soundness of my thoughts and to take positive action a little more quickly then I might have otherwise. Blogging helps keeps my perspective in check.

I blog for social reasons. I love the way blogging has allowed me to communicate with distant friends and family and to reconnect with people that I had lost touch with. One of the unexpected benefits is that I'm getting to know people I never met before in both my own neighborhood and all over the world. This honest dialogue has only served to broaden my perspective. I am inspired, informed, moved and intrigued by others. I still get a kick out of the fact that people are actually interested in hearing what I have to say.

I blog because I want to improve my writing. In order to write well you need to write often. After the trauma of bombing the Analytical essays on the GRE’s I definitely want to improve my writing. Now if I could only do something about my handwriting…

I also blog to have a journal of where I am now and to store information that I may want to reference at some point in the future.

I truly have a personal blog. I don’t have a topic or a theme. I love reading thematic blogs, but I really don’t want one myself. Sometimes I wish I did, but a thematic blog just doesn’t fit in with my other goals. Sometimes I need to remind myself that that's okay.

I also do not blog for an audience. I think that many new bloggers have this vision of their blog becoming as cool and popular as dooce. I admit that at times I have entertained such thoughts myself. Honestly, I’m just not that cool, that brave, or that controversial. I blog in a conversational tone to my friends. I generally avoid subjects that are overly controversial or offensive, because well that just isn’t me.

My Little Miss Perfect thinks that I should write one well thought out post at a fairly consistent time each day. Each post should be funny, witty, and informative, complete with links and illustrations that I had created myself. There should be a picture or photo with each and every post. I should email a personal response to each comment I received. I should read each and every post of those that comment on my blog and I should read and comment on many other blogs besides. This should all be done with love in my heart and should be orchestrated seamlessly. No pressure. I simply don’t have the time to meet Little Miss Perfect’s standards. Trying to do so just makes me grumpy.

If I could do half of what Little Miss Perfect thinks I should do I’d be thrilled, but lately even that has been difficult. I even briefly considered taking some time off or quitting blogging altogether, but what would that solve? It would only feed into my all or nothing tendencies and Little Miss Perfect would succeed in taking all my fun away.

So I’m going to kick back for a while and put the fun back into things. I’m making no promises, because the second I do Little Miss Perfect while start chanting these promises in my ear. I can guarantee that will not be blogging everyday. Not for a lack of things to say, but for a lack of time to say it. I can also guarantee that things will not be as well decorated as they once were. Perhaps by spending less time searching for illustrations to my posts, I’ll actually start taking more photographs again.