Why I blog
In my professional life, I write a lot. My column, brochure copy, reports, business letters, research papers, proposals, etc. So much so that it’s come to a point when I feel my writing style has become too… “technical” (whatever that means). I miss high school as much as anyone would, but I have an additional nostalgic longing: I wrote more from the heart back then.
All throughout high school I wrote a journal. But it was a special kind, because each entry was written like a letter, which I gave to a dear friend for her to read and keep. After graduation, she presented it to me as a gift, all bound and neatly arranged by date. She said, “This is you.” Boy, that frightened me. After overcoming the dread of self-discovery, I read and reread it the whole summer vacation. And no matter how I tried to twist the content to my own interpretation, there was no escaping that it was written by me, and written with painful honesty and passion.
I did rediscover myself: how I’d been as a teenager struggling with love, acceptance, competition, anger, sorrow…. Reading about my growing-up self was, and still is, one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. And what I did as a result of this painful jolt of reality still moves me with regret to this day. I burned my journal. I watched all those precious pages go up in smoke. Before going off to university, I’d resolved to be a better man (whatever that meant at such a young and inexperienced age), and burning those pages seemed the way to shake the dust off my sandals. So to speak. The dust being the unpleasant aspects of the person I perceived I was then.
What I did would impinge on my ability to write in the many years to come. In college, when I tried to again write a memoir as an outlet for my burgeoning thoughts, I couldn’t. The ink wouldn’t flow. Each time I’d try to open a fresh page to express myself indelibly, the ashes of that now-beloved Journal would haunt me.
But I did find a way to write again. As long as it wasn’t about myself, or anything that came from my heart, I could write. Thus my almost-career as a writer was born. I realized I could write brilliantly, and my colleagues and superiors saw this as well. And so in my nearly two decades as a man of this world, I’ve used my pen (or my word processor, for that matter) as if I’d not borne that stigma of a Journal-burner.
However, my outlets for writing have all been so formal. When I started getting published as a columnist, it seemed there was to be an opening for me to express myself as I ought to. But it wasn’t to be, since I myself chose the genre and consequently set the limitations of my column, “I.T. Talks!“. In my writing milieu, until recently, there was simply nowhere that I could express myself frankly and openly.
And so this is why I blog. I’m Blogie, and I’ve discovered blogging. Actually I’ve long known about this web service, but the phobia of expression of self via the written word was still in me. Apparently, not anymore (I hope). Here I can express myself to my heart’s content, and hopefully, rediscover the joy of putting to words my thoughts and feelings as honestly and passionately as I’d done back then.
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