on blogging

Once I had a friend who wrote something on her blog about not wanting to want to sacrifice the opportunity to live life for the chance to write about it.

And that has always troubled me a bit.
Because I think maybe I have been afraid of being guilty of that.
Worried that maybe I should put this blog thing on hiatus for awhile and see what happens. That I should step away from the lap top and do the dishes or grade some papers or play yet another game of Candy Land.

But this isn’t a breaking up blog post.

With some evalutation, I have come to the opposite conclusion.
I live better when I write about it.

I process nothing internally. It all has to be outloud.
Or in this case. Typed out.
So writing about it. Often gets me to a point that I didn’t know was there before I started typing.
And the rest of the time, I just ramble.

And also the potential for writing about something makes me a little bit braver. It gives me that extra incentive to try something new. To learn someone’s story or to push myself in a way I hadn’t before. It makes me want to do new and hard things. For material. For the lesson. For the experience. Sometimes I worry if this is cheating. A secret motive or an agenda. But mainly it is just an extra push to get me past the fear of something new.

Most of all I want to keep this up for the remembering. I think people who are more artistic than I, look at the world with a different eye. They see characters and photographs and paintings. I am not that good at imagining. But writing about my life has started to re-shape my moments. The good ones and the hard ones and especially the ones with my family that I want to remember. Get soaked in. And remembered. And re-typed later with every adjective. And I’m wondering if I would notice these moments in the same way if I didn’t plan on writing about them later.

I have gotten to a point where I want people to read this blog. I’m still not really sure what I’m doing with it. If I am working on a writing platform or looking for community or plan on one day selling my soul to advertisers. But I do know that no one will read this if I don’t have anything to say. A life of me sitting on the couch watching Ellen and eating chocolate may be enjoyable. For a little while. But is mostly just boring. And so, writing about my life….has often made me get up off my couch and attempt to live something worth reading about.

There are lots of blog posts out there that beg the question, Why do you blog? So I won't do that. But I will ask what I think is even a more important one....
How does writing about your life affect how you are living it?