Naked Blogger

Journal-writing is something I do for myself so that I can look back, see the progres­sion my life has taken and then look forward expectantly to new experiences to fill the blank pages. A journal can be as poorly written as the writer wants it to be and contain personal thoughts to be hidden away and infrequently divulged. Blogs, on the other hand, are a differ­ent matter entirely.

Blogs are meant to be public, to be shared, and to provoke discussion, insight, and commentary, something I did not understand when I started my own blog. I had been think­ing about starting one, and when the [in]Visible team wanted an article about the blogging experience, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to start one. Since I started my blog, www.spoonydriftwood.blogspot.com, I have discovered for myself how public a form of writ­ing it is. It has an audience, so I found myself putting more and more thought into my posts, examining how they were written, and wondering if they were polished to a sufficient degree. I wanted to make my blog understandable and exciting in order to make friends of mine want to read it for pleasure, instead of feeling obliged to do so because I posted a link on their Fa­cebook walls.

For me, writing is a tool to make sense of confusing issues, ranging from academic to personal and everywhere in between, as well as a cathartic exercise. After writing down an event that causes me frustration, such as a heated phone call with my sister, I am cleansed be­cause I have physically expelled those feelings from the call. Thinking that a blog was a type of electronic journal that few people would see, I wrote that I missed home late one night. My plan backfired spectacularly, as I received several responses consoling me when I thought no one would notice my post. In all honesty, I was not that homesick, and I felt naked that others had seen my confession of weakness.

Although blogs are handy for writing down a quick update on one’s life, blogs can be open to as many people as stumble upon them. My problem was that I did not realize just how open to the world a blog can be. At first I felt as if I had been invaded, but now I publish what I am doing or thinking about with a little more caution than I did at the the start of my blog­ging experience. I did not want to be critiqued for what I was saying, to have my friends think that what or how I thought was weird or odd. Journaling was like being in a crystal tower – I could think and express myself, but I was not willing to share what I thought or let myself accept the fact that others may think I was wrong or miss the point of what I was saying. My self-confidence does not have its foundation on what others think about me. My thoughts are valid in their own right because I am a thinking human in the midst of achieving her higher education.

Life and thinking are not solitary things. They cannot be pent-up and written only in a journal; what we think must rub against what other people think. A blog, and the Internet, as many people have already discovered, is a pretty good way to do that.

Needless to say, I have learned to not be afraid that other people may challenge my thoughts or feel put out when people do not respond to issues that I may think are important. My self-worth lies in the fact that I am thinking, not what other people think – although in the future, I may be more discriminating about whom I invite to see my blog, and particularly discriminating about what I choose to publish.

That said, please feel free to visit at www.spoonydriftwood.blogspot.com