Why I Started Blogging Again – AKA #Blaugust Day 4

I wasn’t entirely sure what to write about today when I woke up, so my first thought was “Well, that didn’t take long.”  Like I said in the first day’s post, I wasn’t really expecting to WIN when I joined this Blaugust thinger, I just needed an excuse to get writing again, and it was pretty convenient. “But Chris, WHY do you want to write?” Well, faceless voice coming from inside my own head… THAT is a more complicated and kinda vague thing to explain, but here, let’s give it a shot.

When I was blogging about WoW, it started as a pretty impulsive, spur of the moment thing (not unlike how I did this blog a few days ago heh). Over the course of my blog I found myself venting frustrations, and celebrating victories, and giving information, and ranting and raving and laughing and pointing and all kinds of other fun things like that. It also helped introduce me to a LOT of some of the most awesome people I know now (although Twitter has a lot to do with that too, but I think it’s safe to say that blogging really got me into twitter as well). But there was more to it than that. I started blogging in a very difficult time in my life. I was suffering from some pretty heavy depression, even if I may not have recognized it as such at the time, and having a set place to cohesively put my thoughts down on “paper” (as it were) helped keep me centered at times. Not that this always worked, of course, nothing is foolproof. Looking back at some of my old posts… well they’re positively CRINGE-worthy in comparison, and I have to wonder what the hell I was thinking about when I wrote them. My depression had been getting better for a while, and I started blogging less. I don’t think for a minute that these two trends are related, but they DID coincide. I met a wonderful woman, she moved in, we got married, and I blogged less. Again, the trends are not related in the slightest, but they did move along together.

I can see my thoughts scattering as I write this out here, so let me try to bring this back around to a point. I guess what i’m getting at (in the most roundabout way ever) is that i’ve really kind of missed having this sort of outlet. I’m not using it as any sort of therapy for myself, it’s just a bonus side effect. I used to read a LOT of blogs back in the day, and interact a lot more with the writers of other blogs. I met quite a few people that way, and I miss that… interaction, I think. I don’t think I even realized that exactly, until I wrote that out just now, oddly enough. That’s one of the most fun things about blogging. It’s less about what you find out about other people when writing, and more about what you find out about YOURSELF when you’re writing. Somewhere along the way I had forgotten that. I think that’s a lot of what this contest is about. Forcing yourself to get thoughts down on a page everyday for 31 days is going to teach you a lot about yourself, and it might also teach some other people about you as well, but in the long run, I don’t think that’s nearly as important. Blogging, at least for me, isn’t about subscribers or readers, or even necessarily about the community, but the journey of self-discovery you go on when you make yourself process your own brain into a cohesive set of paragraphs onto a page. And if people want to read about you also, then that’s just gravy.