I’ve contributed my fair share of posts about why (bother) blogging at all, and while I resist the solipsistic urge to overly consider myself, I am serially drawn to make some sense of it. Here are some recent posts to consider.
David Johnson:
That is me and blogging. I enjoy writing. It moves me, flexes a creative urge within me, one that I cannot leave alone or ignore – a wish to explain, describe, explore through the written word. I enjoy it for its own sake, for my sake. I am very happy if someone loves what I write or share, and I will keep writing even if the next piece is not seen.
For the Love of Writing…of Blogging
Sylvia:
Then one morning, I wrote something in my journal, I think, or for a blog post that has stuck with me ever since: I blog for an audience of one: me.
This realisation keeps me writing, keeps me sharing what I write.
Sebastian:
My latest blogging adventure has been going on since 2024 and I am still looking for my blogging style. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I treat it as my path. A path that leads through my thoughts, which sometimes follow a straight path and sometimes bumpy roads. However, regardless of whether I feel like writing down a one-sentence thought or a multi-paragraph reflection, I am guided by something that Leslie Lampart beautifully put into words: “If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking”. So I’m writing because I’m thinking.
I’m writing because I’m thinking
Joan Didion:
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
There’s probably no one irreducible reason why; for me, it’s thinking, it’s a creative urge, it’s purpose without material value, it’s work without economic propulsion, it’s maybe even a phenomenological _sine qua non._Maybe a Buddhist attachment, in a negative sense: attachment to identity or narrative, a desire for permanence . It’s the text equivalent of my photos collection, the left-brain accounting of my wanderings on this pebble. I can’t apologize for scrolling through either my photos or my posts for a myriad of reasons.
Do we hope to capture these moments… these ephemera… to avoid forgetting them? In the hopes that we’ll see them again one day and remember them fondly? To think that we are, somehow, casting the shadow of our mortality just a bit longer than its natural demarcation?
Yes. Yes we do.