Blogging: Expectations, Disappointment, and Self-discovery

When I started my blog, I had grandiose ideas of how I would post a new, amazing story or adventure everyday. My hopes were to chronicle what I was eating, reading, listening to, and doing for the enjoyment of friends, family, and strangers alike. However, that is not exactly how it has turned out. Two years and over a hundred posts later I am coming to a more rational understanding of what my blog is to me and how I can best use it in my journey through life.

For my Bat Mitzvah my beloved English/Homeroom teacher bought me my very first journal (actually I might have had one before that, Little Twin Stars, I think, but that one never got used). This journal opened a whole new world to me and started me on an important process of self discovery that has spanned over 30 journals so far. At times in my life when I am feeling lost, stressed, wistful, or inappropriately angry with myself, I open these chronicles of my life to look at where I’ve been. They help me gain perspective and realize that the bumps on the road are merely that. I am a not only a survivor of many heartbreaks, disappointments, and unfair situations, I have thrived and realized many goals to fulfill and satisfy myself. I have made my own definition of success by learning to love myself and learning how to give and accept love. Happiness if the true measure of success for me.

I think that lately I have been taking advantage of the fact that few of my friends and family read my blog so I have slowly been turning it into an online diary. A safe place for me to air my petty grievances against society, spout my radically liberal political views, and try and encourage others to read, write, vote, volunteer, and find their own joys to lead lives that they feel proud of and happy with.

Often I teeter between abject despair and shiny idealism, no doubt a throwback to my High School days when any situation fraught with drama was entertaining fodder for the gossip mongers. (Sometimes I ask myself, if we, as a culture are addicted to the soap opera highs and lows that are so frequently in our headlines, but that is a topic which I will have to explore at a later date.) Seeing my previous entries in my journals helps me step back and see things with a more objective eye since I am no longer trapped in the raging storm of emotions since I have committed them to paper and am in no danger of “losing” them. Writing out an emotion provides catharsis and it sometimes feel like I am listening to myself. Giving myself the time and attention that I need to feel like I have been heard. Does that sound stupid?

So, this wasn’t exactly what I meant it to be, this blog is no great masterwork of entertainment. Instead it is a mish-mosh of personal musings meant to inspire, irritate, or amuse, but mostly it is just about and for me.