Tuesday
Jun292010
METABLOG WEEK 2010: How Blogging Changed My Life
Tuesday, June 29, 2010 
This weblog entry is part of METABLOG WEEK 2010.
Whenever I start to talk about blogging, I always mention that I began blogging back in August 2003, because, holy crap, seven years is a long time in blog years. I also mention it, because I want to cement the fact that this is a part of my life. I didn't just sit down and open up a Diaryland weblog to sob about a break-up and then disappear.
I am here. This is part of what I do.
Blogging has managed to insinuate its way into my life in ways I never would have predicted almost seven years ago. From where it was once a pastime I rarely thought about when I was away from the computer, it has become another part of my regular personal, social, and work lives, and it has altered the way I see the world, others, and myself. It has so far shaped the majority of my third decade.
Blogging has changed who I am.
I first began writing when I was seven years old in Mrs. Martin's grade four class, and the rush of crafting that first story propelled me into years of creative writing. I was terrible at first, and high school brought out some of the worst, most earnest drama in my poetry journals, but I was in love with it. Writing granted me a freedom that I found nowhere else.
I allowed the writing to go, though, over the years. I stopped believing in its transformative power. I stopped believing that it mattered. I stopped believing that my abilities could extend beyond scribbling out a few lines about who I had lunch with in a journal. Before the Palinode introduced me to a few early weblogs (see: Luvabeans, Mimi Smartypants) and hooked me up with a Diaryland account, my creativity had ground down to nothing. My confidence in myself to pursue my own goals had all but disappeared. Without a strong creative outlet, I was a hollow thing. I was starved.
When blogging came into my life, though, I started writing again. I may have written about work and cleaning the house and lunch, but I wrote, and the hollow parts that had once been so filled with creation when I was a kid filled again. I began to see myself, to know myself. The stranger I had become fleshed out, and I became recognizable in a way that I had not been for many years.
This sounds very dramatic. It wasn't. It was a slow process that happened over the first few years of my blogging and not in one passionate stroke of realization. Creativity opened up old wounds, and it had the potential to create new ones, so I hesitantly inched back to myself. It was so difficult at times that I thought about giving up on all things creative again and again. It brought me closer to who I was, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to be this person. I worried about the public nature of the space in which I wrote. I questioned why any of it mattered at all. Still, I kept at it, because without a creative outlet, I was lost, and it hurt more to be that lost than it did to be where I was.
Eventually my fears about self-knowledge and the public arena of blogging backed down a little, and I came out about my queerness, albeit clumsily. I wrote about my experience with cancer. I have been honest about my struggle with depression and the like. I shared of myself, and, as I did so, I learned to care for myself, and, dare I say, enjoy myself, in ways that I never could before.
The consequences of this kind of journey, though, are not always pretty. It is difficult to change, even if it is only from being broken to being less broken. Suddenly, parts of my life that I so wanted to fit just didn't anymore. I didn't share this on my weblog at the time due to the state of my employment and my wanting to keep my writing and work life separate, but I fell apart two years ago. I landed in a doctor's office weeping and begging for medication. I quit my job. I sat under a blanket for what was probably the greater part of six months. I went to therapy. I stopped flossing. Shit's serious when you stop flossing. I was a hopeless, weeping mess hiding under a blanket who rarely bathed.
Blogging helped to take me there, too.
Along with all of the good things that opening up to a creative life had given me, it had also brought me to the lowest period I had experienced as an adult. I couldn't be the person I had been before, but I felt like I didn't have anyone else to be. I felt as though I had been laid to waste.
I had not been laid to waste, though. My creative renewal had changed me enough to carry me through. It had changed what I expected for myself, what I wanted for myself. It had opened up a sense of possibility I had once all but lost. I slowly picked myself up, shuffled off my quilt-cave, and began to mould a life for myself that I could more than live with. At the end of the day, my graphic design, writing, blogging, et al do not leave me wealthy (yet), but, as long as I have food in my cupboard, my success is measured in happiness.
Blogging has played no small part in teaching me to honour myself — my queerness, my psychological differences, my creativity, and my very life — and, although I still have a long way to go, I am here, feet firm and brave, in a way that I never knew possible when I floundered creatively rootless prior to August 2003.
It is not the only part of the creative puzzle that has brought me here, but it laid the foundation of all that has followed since August 2003.
Thank you, Palinode, for showing me the way.
Participating METABLOG WEEK 2010 weblog entries:
Reader Comments (6)
Blogging is a very powerful tool both for the blogger and for the people reading. I have met so many people - virtually and face-to-face - from all over through blogging. We have shared so much online and offline. While my blog is not as personal as yours, the writing of it has helped me hash through a lot of things. Just the act of writing something every day makes me feel somehow connected to myself and the wider world - both through the reading I do while researching my posts and the reading I do of other blogs. I might not go so far as to say it's changed my life, but it certainly has had a big impact.
As another "old skool" blogger, I know it's always been something more to me than a tool to make money. To me it's always been about sharing and accepting my own self. That's why I love this line you wrote, "I shared of myself, and, as I did so, I learned to care for myself, and, dare I say, enjoy myself, in ways that I never could before"
Amen, girlie. Amen.
In some ways, I think I have had a quite different blogging journey. I was already writing before I started to blog. If anything, blogging has distracted me from professional goals. But I think it has made me a better person and more aware of myself. My writing has matured. And most of all, it has connected me to a world that I hardly knew existed. I still cannot truly comprehend or explain the feeling that I am somehow connected to others so far away -- for instance, some quirky woman in a Canadian province that I can hardly spell correctly, and know more about her health dramas, her neuroses, her former smoking habit, her cats, her husband, and her inner soul than the names of my next door neighbors in LA.
I am still in my infancy of blogging, not yet two years, but I can already relate to what you describe as sort of finding a path to blogging, finding your voice, and learning what being a 'blogger' means in the grander sense to you as a person.
I started mine to have something to do really. And over the last year and a half I have found it to become something more than a space online, it's actually a second portion of me. I feel the urge to write constantly, to reach out, and it gives me a different way to express myself or even reflect upon myself that I never imagined.
I knew I would be trying to build relationships with people, but I never thought I'd be working on my relationship with myself.
Great post as always, you fabulous and fantastic you.
I'm not sure how much of it is blogging and how much of it is aging, but I find myself more comfortable in my own skin than I ever have before. Still not truly comfortable, but much, much better than I was.
I think part of it is statistics. I have a bigger sample size than just a few friends and family to judge from. I post and get feedback from a broader variety of people, and they, for the most part, judge me to be ok. I don't know if that's the healthiest way to live, but it works for me so far.
Great post, as I said earlier in the week. I just posted my follow-up, which I gotta admit took a couple of times going back to. My comfort zone is snarky commentary, not insight into my own psyche. Glad I went there though. Check it out!