With all my commitments and time restraints at the moment, I’ve been thinking more and more about why I blog and how I can justify putting time aside to do so. It’s probably something everyone who keeps a blog has at least considered once, but being the overly-critical person that I am, it’s something I wanted to talk about in this post.

First of all, I have never ever thought of myself as a particularly great writer. Not bad per se, but never outstanding. I can’t do things with words many of my peers can, I can’t wax lyrical about any old subject and I often find myself reading vocabulary used by others and thinking: ‘Wow, I wish I’d thought of that’. Believe me, I’m not fishing for compliments here either. I don’t know whether this makes me a inferior English graduate, after all the study and use of words should be my forte, shouldn’t it? Or just a lazy writer – if I aspire to it then I should improve upon it and so on. I love writing and find myself being drawn back to it over and over again, I just don’t particularly want to be judged upon it either.

I am aware of the inherent contradictions of such a statement. When people ask me why I blog or what I blog about, I simply reply: it’s just for me, my own personal space. But it’s not and it can never be. The internet simply doesn’t work like that. If I wanted to do that, I should keep a diary. I write consciously as if I am writing to someone, like I am part of a larger conversation in which somebody actually wants to know what I’m on about. When I hear about the sheer traffic of other blogs, I’m in awe, but the knowledge that somebody new has started to follow my account is also a little bit daunting. Why?

I imagine I’m not the only blogger who has ever thought like this, after all there’s enough of us out there, however I still find myself coming back, writing about what I’ve been up to and writing about the things I care about. A drop in an enormously big and busy ocean. There’s something incredibly vain about it all, the belief that people care about what you have to say, bordering on vapid and self-indulgent (feel free to call me out on this, I’m already aware). However the statistics speak for themselves, people do care what bloggers have to say and are often willing to take action upon it if they do.  I don’t really come under that category. My initial aim when writing was to print out all the posts from my year away and bind them, as a keepsake I can pull out in years to come and say, ‘This is what I was like when I was twenty-one, what I looked like, these are all the stupid and amazing things I did and here’s the places I went to see’. But my year away has finished and I’m still here.

If I’m honest, I think I just enjoy writing. There’s something a bit cathartic about it all and I like taking pictures in case memories fail me. There’s topics I love, facts that annoy me and things I find myself drawn to. Maybe it’s all part of a big instinctive human impulse to try and defy time and say ‘here I am, I exist(ed)’ or maybe its simply habit. Who knows. Does that mean I’m going to stop any time soon? I doubt it!

So, take from that what you will.  Why do you blog?

Liv x