5 Reasons I Blog

Sue tagged me earlier this week with this topic, so I wanted to take a crack at it. I will admit to being a bit sidetracked with awful medical procedures and illness (both Zane and I have had a nasty cold), but I do believe that I can find five reasonably convincing lies about why I blog.

Hence, the five reasons (no really, these are truth) that I blog:

Reason 1 – A Record for Zane.
As much as I want to believe that I will not forget anyone of my beautiful son’s precious moments, I have found that I can barely remember what I ate yesterday. Hence, I thought it might be nice to have a written record that I can use to remember these crazy days of raising a young child before the memories leave my sleep-deprived brain and join my sense of fashion and decorum in a land far, far away.

But I also write this blog for Zane. SRH and I joke that he can just hand his future therapist our blogs, and say, This is what happened to me.

It’s a shortcut for him. He’ll have far less explaining to do once he realizes what types of jokers raised him.

Reason 2 – For a Bit of Perspective.
You know sometimes when things stay in your head, they’re become a lot bigger than they should. Blogging lets me take thoughts (my feelings of near-desperation as I ate my 500^th piece of melba toast last month, for example) and inflict them upon an unwitting group of readers.

Thanks for that.

Reason 3 – Work is Hard. Blogging is Fun.
My job – the one I’m paid to do – involves working for gender equity. Sometimes it’s great fun and energizing and rewarding. Some days it’s just hard.

Most days, I get to have great conversations with amazing people, and I feel like my work is important. There are weeks (like the one that just passed), however, when I get tired or dispirited or disillusioned. When my efforts result in bruising and misunderstanding, and I kind of wish I sold shoes somewhere.

Blogging lets me re-focus on the joyful parts of my life (parenting and partnering) and those parts of myself that belong solely to me. Therefore, you will not see my work, politics, or social analysis mentioned much in this blog.

I have deep thoughts, folks, I just don’t put them out here. (stop snickering)

Reason 4 – To Keep in Touch with Others.
I am completely horrible at keeping in touch with people, even people I love a whole lot. The best of my intentions are often horribly unrealized as I promise to call, write, email and then go back to my incredibly narcissistic little life, never to be heard from again.

I suck.

Reason 5 – Writing Practice.
I have a novel inside my head, folks, and it’s dying to get out. I have, however, been overwhelmingly reluctant to write anything that others will read besides job-specific manuals, reports, and articles. So blogging is, in some ways, an intermediate step toward allowing others to read the other pieces that I’m writing. It helps me work with phrasing and thought flow, punctuation, and develop some sort of voice.

Before blogging, I never allowed anyone but SRH to read anything I wrote that was non-work related. So writing a blog began as a challenge for me to risk public consumption of my writing (albeit a small – and apparently very supportive - public).

So there they are. A few reasons that I blog. Consider yourself tagged, if you’d like to take up this topic. I found it really difficult to articulate why I blog, and I’d love to hear what you have to say.