Confession of a Blogger: Writing for Myself
I have a confession to make. Though I’ve written over a thousand blog posts for this website, to be honest, I’m often writing for myself.
Writing for oneself is as old as writing itself. Writers have always written privately. Famous writers like Franz Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. And countless amateurs like me, writing private journals not for publication.
Private journaling
There have been years in my life when I’ve journaled daily, struggling to record and make sense of my experiences. Journaling privately helped me uncover and process what I was going through. Eventually, I stopped journaling, but I kept what I’d written for a long time. Until, one day, I flipped through my journals and realized I didn’t need to keep them anymore.
Private freewriting
While trying to become a writer, I practiced freewriting for several years. Freewriting helped me realize that I could write, that I was a writer. I still have those journals. Though I wrote everything in them for myself, I published one story — “The Batch Fixer” — on this blog last year.
Writing for myself
Although this blog contains posts for anyone to read, I’m often also writing for myself. For example, my post earlier this month: “Nine practical tips to letting go in a chaotic world“; believe me, I’m working on them myself. My posts on meditation, listening, and facilitation are often attempts for me to understand and put into practice what I’m writing about.
So, while I’m sharing advice that you, dear reader, may find helpful, I’m also writing for myself.
A hat tip to my men’s group for the inspiration for this post. We are going on an outing to Emily Dickinson’s home. Dickinson’s only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems and one letter.
