Tagged: Why Do I Blog?

Hi all,

Just back from vacation* and a bit buried but had to post on this. I've finally made it as a blogger!  I got tagged not just once but twice while I was away.  Oh yeah, uh huh, uh huh. 

First up, Dave at Engaging the Disquiet (I LOVE that blog name. L-O-V-E love it.) wants to know 5 reasons I blog. This is an excellent question because I spent some of my time in the desert** asking myself that very same thing and coming back to, count 'em, 337 e-mails in my box today made me wonder it even more.  Is this really the life I want for myself? This virtual existence that wants to ruin my eyes and encourage the sagging of my backside while I stare at this screen?  In the winter in Chicago, sure, but as a lifestyle?  Who are you people anyway and why do I write to you all the time?!

Well, there was an e-mail waiting for me this morning with the subject "Captain, My Captain!" from a blog reader who wanted to talk about hiring me. I was hooked from the title and it just got better from there which leads me to my first reason:

1. I can say and do things at my blog that I would never say or do at my website.  I make myself laugh quite often when I write and when you come out and play with me that makes me laugh even more. I am irreverant, and don't seem to be able to change that and I love it when you tease back and pick up the thread and riff off what I do. I seriously groove on that. I write about really challenging subjects and if we can't all find a way to be playful with each other while suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune or some plain old angst from a couple bone-headed moves then I don't want to play anymore.  I LOVE people who laugh at themselves in the face of their own adversity or neurosis du jour. Makes it so much easier for me to laugh at you, too, when I'm not laughing at myself that is. Which brings me to...

2. Apparently I love bleeding in public.  Or maybe I just like to see how far I can go before I

successfully commit career suicide.  For me, writing has always been a way that I process sadness, grief, anger and generally navigate my way through my quarterly dark night of the soul.  I don't know that I'll ever really understand why I started posting my personal journal up on my old languishing first-born blog, Musings of an Ant Watcher, but once I did my life started to change in some very powerful ways.  It turns out, very few of you seem to be strangers to grief. Who woulda thunk it? And rarely a week goes by that someone doesn't thank me behind the scenes for revealing my humanity as publicly and openly as I do.  You all should know that your support and encouragement to keep writing is one source I draw on for my own courage.  I dive very deeply into issues of mortality and how we deal with the cascade of possible lives that we could have had and still may have a taste of if we are willing to let go of our old definitions of ourself.  Writing has always been a method for me to run experiments on alternate lives.  Why not share that with you?  I benefit from the writings of others who have been willing to reveal themselves. Who am I to withhold the results of my own experiments from you?  Aren't we all in this together?

3. I write things so that I can decide if I think they are true.  This is where a blog gets to be fun.  If I were only writing a newsletter for my business, I'd restrict myself a lot more to what I feel I can confidently claim expert status in.  A blog has fuzzier edges.  I can rant (boy can I rant), I can assert, I can question, I can ponder, I can declare, I can draw my line in the sand and see if it stays put.  Then you get to react, respond, challenge or cheer and in the process my own feelings and thoughts get refined and I come away with a much truer sense of who I am, what I value and what I stand for.  It's very selfish really.  Well, okay, not selfish as much as internal.  And then the internal becomes external for all of us and hopefully someone among us learns something...and often it is me. Which leads me to...

4. I actually AM an expert in a few things at this point, and some of you could stand to learn a thing or two from me. Yeah, that sounds cocky, but only because it's true and I have no problem claiming it. Am I the perfect friend to everyone? Of course not.  Have a dropped a few balls here and there because I have trouble containing my life into a single life? Oh yes, indeed, I have. Am I sorry about that?  Yes, and I say so. Imperfections aside, I've had several people comment in the last couple years that they note I have a LOT of love in my life.  That's not a coincidence.  Scott and I have a fabulous marriage (even with a doozie of a fight recently...you should know that...it isn't that we don't hit our rough patches, we just navigate them exceptionally well).  I have several friends that I know without blinking will be in my life until one or the other of us dies.  Some of them are even male-female relationships and have not involved the hokey-pokey OR the hanky-panky so it can be done, people. Even at midlife, it can be done.  I was a trophy wife for a man in midlife crisis twenty something years ago and lived among that tribe of angst ridden searchers with all the accompanying and cliched shenanigans and I know some of you are just now navigating some of those same issues.  All that drama and some of it quite destructive.  I'm not unfamiliar with that pain but I got over it a couple decades ago and spent the last twenty years learning how to do it right (for myself, personally, while also completing all the coursework for a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology and later spending an additional 18 months getting coach training) and anyone who has been poking around this blog knows I've got the evidence to back up what I say.  Why would I not want to help you by sharing what I have learned?  Why you may insist on making your own mistakes...now that is another kettle of fish, my friend.

5. I keep getting cooler and cooler clients because of my blog.  I go back and forth about whether I think of this blog as a marketing tool.  The truth is, I don't think in that mode when I'm writing although sometimes I think I'm supposed to until I remember that I don't enjoy writing when I'm trying to sell myself to you.  However, since clients do come to me from my readers technically this is "marketing" in a functional way and thank God for it, I say because you blog readers are an intriguing lot.  But in my view, it's really a relationship here more than you responding to some clever marketing language I secretly employ to mesmerize you with my mighty mojo.  The truth is, most of you will never say hi or comment or do anything but quietly read my stuff because you are a bunch of big sissies. And when that goes on for too long I feel lonely and unappreciated and just as I am about to toss my computer out the window as a good for nothing contraption that has not one single thing to do with real life I get this e-mail that begins: "I took your advice: I have some soothing music on courtesy of a former yoga instructor from a while ago, I have a steaming cup of rooibos on one side and my co-dependent German Shepherd on the other, and my Oriental Woods candle fills the room with it's flavor" leading into a beautifully thought provoking letter and you can't tell me that this person and I haven't jumped in to a relationship already.  The more "me" I am here, the more of "you" I get to meet when connections actually are made.  I am really not good at all with small talk so if you read my stuff and want to just hit the ground running...well, that's living, baby.  If I show up here at my most real I have discovered that it's a lot more likely that you'll show up just as real and frankly I'm too old and jaded to have much patients for garden variety "can you help me take my life to the next level?" coaching.  Face it, no one even knows what that phrase means anyway.

6. Here's a bonus: I get to be more than a "coach" here.  I can be a photographer, a poet, a wife, a friend, a cage rattler, a wise, witty and oh-so-beloved teacher (you know it, you know it, uh huh, you know it), a confused and tormented woman, a human Google. In short, I can be an integrated, growing and evolving woman.  More evolution is coming but first I have all those e-mails.

* I didn't tell you where we went on vacation.  That was very hard because I know many people that I truly would have loved to have seen face to face and we were essentially in your backyards.  But then again, I was seriously needing some completely devoted husband and wife time and I couldn't have both.  While I was trying to figure out how to handle this a very wise friend who is also a compuer-less individual (really) reminded me that I have a right to a private life.  And, so is my husband.  You know, bloggers forget things like that.

**Really, I'm not telling you where we went.  It's been such a long time since I have had a secret I'm kind of enjoying it.  At some point I'll post some pics, though, probably, and then you can be mad at me later if you want while I learn how to spell B-O-U-N-D-A-R-Y.

So, whom should I tag...

I know who needs the question and who do I think deserves a look by you fine readers? (ahem, yes, I know a couple of you are cringing but that's why you love me...and I don't want no stinking party line answers from anyone of you.)  Why do you blog?

Erin at Wandering Woman

Craig at Renovate Your Life with Craig

Nancita at The Loca Diaries and The Savvy Comadre (I'm curious about how you see the two blogs working at this point, since I seem to have dropped off my personal one...)

Ben, the hardest working man in blog carnivals at Start Up Spark

Di at People are Stories

And a bonus, because I always have just one more...

Dick at Rowan on Decision Making

Don't forget to trackback here so we can all follow your answers...

Comments

[Di]

Let me sleep on it... :)

It's almost midnight as I write this and the tag feels like it requires some big thinking.

Lovely post!

[Dave]

Hey Laura - thanks - I am glad you like the name "Engaging the Disquiet".

And I love your 6 reasons! You make it all so juicy. Keep bringing on your great writing!

And thanks for the 5 new places to explore. I am looking forward to it.

Cheers!

[Erin]

Ahem. My lame blogging host doesn't support trackbacks, that I know of. I linked back.

http://wandering-woman.blogspot.com/2007/02/tagged-why-do-i-blog.html

[kate]

Got me going again, dear friend. Check it out: http://omnicrone1.typepad.com/katethoughts/2007/02/sparked_by_one_.html

[Laura Young]

Great posts, you guys. Kate, it's so good to have you back! Very nice commentary on the dark night of the soul. It is definitely a rhythm thing for me. Sounds like for you, too. If you can trust that it makes it much richer because you stop fighting it. Maybe I was a whale in another life. Always feel like I dive so deep and then come up for air (and maybe some spouting off!!) and then dive...
I find it to be a delicious process now that I don't see it as slipping back as you so nicely discuss in what you wrote.
See you in the wide blue ocean...