I’m grateful for some lovely comments from my recent post Why Blog? and more from the next day’s: (Virtual) community rocks! They’ve shown up here on my website, and also on Twitter. But even more, I’m grateful for the virtual becoming real; for community and conversation. What I’ve been struck by in subsequent dialogue with some of the comment-ers, is that I’m not alone; my feelings and experiences with blogging resonate and replicate that of others. The virtual is real. Relationships form. Conversation ensues. Voices build. Change occurs. Hope endures.
But even more happens. Others read my writing and then I get invited to read theirs: bloggers who are creating amazing posts, filled to the brim with beauty and meaning. But don’t just take my word for it, read their words. I have two to share with you – tonight and tomorrow. Right now, meet Lindsey of A Design So Vast. She posted a comment on my Why Blog? post and then blogged on the same topic on her site. Read her words…and then a few more of mine at the end. (And watch for another amazing blogger’s post tomorrow…)
There’s been a proliferation of interesting writing on the topic of Why We Blog this week. Ronna addressed it, focusing on three main points: that blogging is a way to get outside ourselves, is therapeutic, and is a way to tell our stories. She asserted, and I agree, that we all have myriad stories to tell. She hinted that in this telling we are both ourselves enriched and, possibly, privileged to participate in the growth of others. Ronna included an Isak Dinesen quote I love: To be a person is to have a story to tell.
She followed up this post with a second, the next day, about the way that “blogging is a way to create and experience community.” I very much agree with this point, which echoed Aidan’s thoughtful observations on why she blogs. I share the sentiment that blogging is a way to meet (and be met by) people whose lives and stories are very different from our own. I am sometimes keenly aware of the general homogeneity of my life. I love my life, of course, but I do have a certain restlessness of the spirit that is slaked, in part, by learning about people whose lives and choices are very different from my own.
So I’ve been thinking this weekend about Why I Blog. I know I feel a visceral impulse to share the stories of my life, both the mundane ones and the meaningful ones. I know that writing often helps me put shape around my nascent or amorphous thoughts, helps me understand the underlying current beneath a riptide of emotion. Joan Didion put it best: “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.”
But there’s another, impossible to ignore, reason why I blog. After all, blogging both assumes and actively seeks an audience. Obviously I need, on some level, to know that someone is reading my words. I think this is a reflection of the basic human need to be truly seen. But is it exhibitionistic? Does it make the thoughts and content less meaningful? Is it the wrong thing, to want someone to be reading? I have thought about this a lot, struggling with the initial feeling that it is immature and needy of me to need someone to be out there reading me. On some level this is just a continuation of a pattern of needing to be validated and approved by the big bad world out there, isn’t it?
I think it is that, yes. But I think it is more than that too. I imagine that most writers write for an audience, whether it’s an audience of one (perhaps Steven King’s Ideal Reader) or millions. I cannot in good conscience claim the title of “writer” for myself, but I know that one reason I blog is because I hope to, someday, provide for someone else that shimmering sigh of recognition that some writing I’ve read has given me. That bone-deep sense of being not alone when someone else can put into words thoughts or feelings that have swarmed incoherently around my head and heart. If I can, someday, give a single reader that feeling that I have had so many times in my years of blog-reading, then I will be happy. It feels arrogant to even wish for that, but in truth, I do. I am personally sustained by those moments when someone else’s writing makes my heart physically swell with identification and awareness, and I aspire to provide that for someone else.
For me, more than the community, more than the catharsis, more than the story-telling, it’s about that. About that feeling of recognition, that single moment when you read a sentence or a paragraph and suddenly understand something you’ve known all along in a new way. Which, when I think about it, is sort of an amalgam of community, catharsis, and story-telling. I’ve been blessed to be on the receiving end of that feeling many times, and I continue to hope that I might provide it for someone out there.
To illustrate my point, here is one such passage – a paragraph that made me shiver because it put into such beautiful words something I’ve thought before. A paragraph that happens to be ABOUT that feeling. (oh so very meta).
Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, at the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity?
- Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
Yes, I have. And I did just there. And that’s why I write.
(And no, I am not arrogantly comparing myself to one of the great writers of the last few decades. No. I come up to Carol Shields’ ankle. But she inspires me.)
Isn’t that beautiful? And as I read Lindsey’s words, I imagine the two of us in conversation. Sipping wine. Or coffee. Talking about writing. Talking about vulnerability. Talking about being read and seen and heard. Talking about life.
Mine is enriched because of (virtual) community/conversation with Lindsey. I trust yours is as well.
Check back tomorrow for another amazing post by Lindsey’s friend! Yes…more (virtual) community/conversation yet to come!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Ronna, I love Lindsey’s writing and her perspective, and if this is a sign of your direction, then wow! this is going to be a highbrow, intelligent, thoughtful and classy joint. (Of course it was, already. You knew I meant that, right?)
Lindsey- Yes! We need to be heard. To be heard is to be human. To be heard is to be held. Yes.
Wow, Ronna
I am so honored that you included my words
You, and you, Kelly, and Aidan, are all enormous inspirations to me.
Thank you!
Lindsey
Lindsey´s last blog ..Picture Day
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