Betchablog is officially a year old today. I was looking back through some old entries the other day and found the very first post written on the 17th August last year. I suddenly realised that a whole year had passed… Wow, how time flies! So much has changed in that 12 months, I can hardly believe it.
It raises the obvious question… “Why blog?” It seems that Betchablog has had 141 posts in 52 weeks, that’s almost 3 a week. It takes a reasonable amount of effort to consistently do something that often, so what’s the payoff?
I get asked about that a lot, and it’s usually with the implication that I must just have way too much time on my hands. On the contrary. I have way too little time to do all the things I want or need to do, but somehow through all of that, blogging has become a really integral part of who I am and how I express myself. There is something incredibly therapeutic about committing your vague, intangible thoughts into written words, crafted together to make some sort of sense (even if only to myself). Blogging has helped clarify my own position on many issues, raised my ability to “think out loud”, helped give me insights into things that I’d not thought about, and, I think, made me a better writer. The comments back on some of the posts I’ve written have been sometimes encouraging, sometimes devastating, sometimes insightful, but always welcome. The sense of community that has developed with other bloggers is something I really value too, and reading what others write is an equally important part of being a member of this world.
Writing your thoughts in a blog, where they become public, is so different to writing them in a private diary somewhere. For me, the public nature of blogging is where its true worth comes from. It’s the act of putting it “out there”, exposing your thoughts, ideas and opinions to a community of intelligent readers and writers, that makes it the powerful medium that it is.
Having said that, I don’t write for you. I write for me. I would do this even if there were no audience. (For all I know, there may not be!) People sometimes say to me, “who reads it?”. My answer is, “who cares?”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really nice to get feedback in the form of comments and to know that you may have said something that impacted on someone, but at the end of the day I don’t write for anyone else but me.
I encourage everyone I know to blog. Go on. You know you want to.
So why do YOU blog?
Tags: blogging, betchablog
