Blogging has never been a particularly taxing task for me, but once in a while I either forget entirely about the existence of my blog or feel an insurmountable dread towards the act of putting my thoughts down to a screen and share them publicly. This is why for a while blogging has remained a private activity in my mind, and resembled journaling more than anything. I like being able to release the chaos in my head into neat lines of texts and put a bit more thoughtful considerations into where to go from these muddled ideas. Instead of letting thoughts whirl around as a messy stream of fragmented consciousness, I journal and blog to organize and compartmentalize bits of my mind and feel slightly more relieved at this illusion of ‘action’ (via the ‘act’ of writing something down). A journal is my safe haven, and journaling a comfort practice that allows me to stay wrapped in my consciousness and limited perception of the world.
Slowly I have grown out of this cocoon that is private journaling. Blogging and other forms of opinion sharing (especially on the vast wild kingdom called the Internet) become less frightening and more appealing. I still think it’s hard sometimes to come to terms with the permanence of an online existence and the fact that what is put online stays online forever. This is why I have for incalculable times gone back and forth between publicizing and privatizing my blog for fear of becoming irreversibly exposed and vulnerable to the judgments of the Internet. Yet, just as I go about my regular, offline life as an adult, a citizen, a member of my community, I always hold opinions – decidedly imperfect, faulty, and regrettable ones. The Internet for sure makes it easier for people to fall prey to public scrutiny, as an element of permanence and solidity is built into it. In real life, we’re not as easily held accountable for something we said ages ago. But then again, the point isn’t so much to never say or do something one may want to retract later on – it’s most definitely an impossible feat. Sharing opinions is a part of the learning process and of building a connection with others, neither of which requires perfection or a complete absence of potential blunders. I cannot imagine having conversations with people around me in real life and being suspended every few seconds by a fear of slipping and speaking the wrong thing. And so lately, my approach to blogging has transitioned from utmost caution to a more out-in-the-open, non-filtered manner of expression. Having this blog is great in that I allow myself to loosen up the tendency to pause and calibrate myself to whichever standard there is out there, and to treat public writing as just another form of free self-expression irrespective of external judgment.
As I have mentioned before in another entry, what I like about blogging is that it is not tied to a non-voluntary audience or readership. Unlike social media where it’s altogether more difficult for my friend to be selective about what content to consume out of everything I put up, a blog is something a person needs to actively choose to visit and read. It’s not an act of shoving stuff in my readers’ face – if I have any readers at all for that matter. Seeing a blog in this way relieves a bulk of the burden on having to produce something that is somehow informative and useful, witty and interesting, and syntactically perfect all at once. Blogging can thus be a casual pastime rather than a performative platform. I can keep it as casual, choppy, flawed, repetitive, or even pointless as I wish. After all, blogging is only worth it for as long as it allows me to organize my thoughts and express myself free from the terror of ‘perfection’ and external valuation.