Remind Me

Why am I doing this again? Keeping this blog I mean. I'm not entirely sure where it fits in my life any more.

When I started keeping it I was in a big transitional phase between college and the working world. Not to mention being in personal crisis and involved in a few self destructive relationships. I needed a sounding board, a place to vent my thoughts and feelings; publishing those thoughts made me pay more attention what I was spewing into the keyboard. Made me think about what I was saying about myself, and about others. Not to mention making me attempt to pay attention to grammar and word choices. It was a therapeutic writing exercise combined with an attempt to get back into writing again.

There were things I needed to put "out there" just to stop them from knocking around inside my head and distracting me, and in the process of turning those fragmentary thoughts and emotions into the semblance of a cohesive paragraph I would be able to break down the images and line them up somewhat. I'd figure out why they were bugging me. Or at least figure out partly where they came from.

Even after I moved to San Diego, where I lived was no haven and I was actively pursuing a course of therapy for past hurts. There was a lot of re-ordering, reclassification and settling out going on in my head. The grand pie chart project of 2002. Now...I don't need a webspace to act as silent therapist any more. I can talk to Matt. I can talk to my friends. I can talk to my cats if I want to hear back advice no more complex than a squeak and a purr. I'm no longer wondering where the hell I went wrong, I know where I've gone wrong and I know where I took the right path after all.

Yet I keep posting. Laundry lists of what I did the past week. Poor me, I spent a ton on my car, and I'm not completely broke or really that upset, it's just life. My cats are cute, I love my fiance, weddings are expensive, we bought a condo, the cats are still cute and I'm getting to sound like a smug married with no real challenges or internal struggles. Even having facial surgery with very little warning turned out ok, it was hugely traumatic at the time, but I didn't write about it. Whenever I was lost in a reverie about what it could mean to me if I ended up with an ugly scar, I was not about to walk to my computer and start typing. My crises don't hit me when I'm sitting at my desk any more, they're not so overwhelming that they take over my brain until I channel them onto the page. They wait their turn until I'm lying in bed, at worst until I'm driving home (when I quickly shove the worst of them to the back until I'm not negotiating SoCal traffic).

I think the main reason I keep going is that I love being able to click on my archive and see what was going through my head exactly a year ago, or two years. The snippets are so random sometimes. I remember the incidents but can't believe they only happened a year ago, that I was in such an unhappy state so recently, or that this or that bothered me so much back then. The biggest example is how plagued I was by my past, and how I've learned to move on without blocking it completely and setting myself up for another big crash.

I like having a web presence. Of course I also fantasize about having a readership, but I'm pretty sure my "readership" consists solely of a few people who knew me at some point and are curious to see what's going on in my life. Just like I read a couple of blogs kept by people I no longer have contact with, but am curious to see how they're doing. I toy with the idea of a different blog to focus on my currently feeble attempts to knock myself off the fitness plateau, I toy with the idea of forbidding myself from posting anything but a decent bit of creative writing. I toy with the idea of paying more attention to the news and posting some semi intelligent comments on things that are important to me. I've had an offer to write a medical reporting column for an online magazine.

Online Magazine? You know...I should pursue that one. Then I won't be writing pointless crap about re-organizing my underwear drawer. I'll be writing potentially useful crap about recent medical fads and rumors.

Excuse me, I must go talk to a penguin about a new hobby.