Writing as therapy

Do you ever read someone’s blog and think, no! Stop! You’re too vulnerable! Don’t hang this out there! We talk a lot about how much we should share about our kids but there’s the sharing of ourselves, too. For the past month, I often cringed when I was reading Katie’s blog but I’ve cringed reading her blog before, too. She’s very widely read and she blogs about EVERYTHING. She blogged her divorce, she blogged her pregnancy losses. She blogs at her site and on Babble and she gets terrible, awful, mean comments but she keeps blogging.

Most of us writers already knew what many bloggers discover, which is that writing is one of the best ways to figure out what in the heck is going on with our lives. You can write your way out of a problem and into a new attitude. You can start writing in one place and put your pen down with a sigh (or lean back away from your keyboard) and realize that you have written yourself into a whole better place.

Katie is also a huge blogging as activism person. She has always been a strong advocate for breastfeeding and she has always blogged the hell out of it even when working full-time meant she had to partially wean her youngest. She blogs from a feminist, pro-woman, pro-motherhood perspective and some of her best work has been around the topic. I have no doubt that she will take her passion and her skill and create more wonderful writing out of her personal tragedy because she is driven not just to write her way through her struggles but also to use her work as a means to help other people through their struggles.

Blogging is powerful.

It’s powerful because it’s public but because it’s public and because blogging is rarely a carefully planned event for most of us (most of us kinda just wing it, right? I know I do) it means that people get snapshots of us as works in progress. To me, that’s what’s so wonderful about a blog and what makes it a piece of performance art (as long as it isn’t taken over by product reviews and memes — a little bit of that goes a long way, eh?). It’s a virtual permanent record of our impermanency, a record of our growth and change and the patterns of who we are and who we are becoming.

When I teach blogging classes, I always give examples of blogs that are pretty rigid in their scope because I think for a new, nervous blogger having a focus can make it easier to get started. I also think that the irony of giving yourself strict limits it that it can force you to be more creative. If you are blogging, say, only about bikes you have owned, you will have to dig in deep to make that interesting. You may start by just writing about finding your first trike under your Christmas tree and then find yourself another time writing about the specific sound of the bell on the handlebars and the fantasy you had of yourself in other people’s eyes, powerful and fast on your first two-wheeler, ringing the bell so people would stop and stare in astonishment to see you fly by so fast.

At the same time, I think for those of us who stick ourselves or who are stuck by others in genres need to remember that blogs are not like books. A book may need to be easily categorized but a blog is a living thing. It is growing and maturing and while the readers help build the blog and help guide the blogger through their visits and comments (a popular topic may inspire us to write more on that topic), we are the authors and we get to define what we are. It’s why I’m grateful now that I gave my blog such a broad title way back when. If I’d defined my blog more narrowly — as “just” an adoption blog or “just” a writer’s blog — I’d have a hard time justifying my need to write other things; I’d be worried about disappointing my audience. But I’ve found that some of you like the posts on writing and some like the posts on adoption and some of you never ever comment unless I write something about, say, freelancing. It’s all good. And for me, it’s all been good therapy, too.

In other words, you can write more about bikes if you want to. You’re the boss of your blog.

So when I think about giving up my blog in January, I lean more toward remembering that I get to decide what it is and how to work it. I can change my scope. I can also take down archives. (I know they live on in internet cache but only a really dedicated spirit could find them and then god love her, let her read ‘em!) I think maybe I will give myself useful rules like that I will only write on Wednesdays perhaps or that I will only write on X or something like. I won’t be sure until I get there, I guess. But I do look forward to a time when I can afford to take down the ads because I’ve never much liked having those.