30-Day Blogging Challenge

Blogging is the art of sharing oneself. It allows an individual to voice themselves via the amazing means of the World Wide Web. I think blogging expresses individuality but also forges solidarity and connectedness. It is about expression and sharing.

I first started blogging back in my teenage years, on Myspace (ha!). Actually, it may have been before this. I was part of a clique at my local girls' high school, and as part of the pact to "keep in touch" when a couple of members of the said group was moving to different schools, myself included. It was a naive and fruitless endeavour because we all simply just grew apart. I then started the myspace blog, before moving Wordpress.

My Wordpress blog was pretty well maintained, given that for my HSC year, I decided to blog everyday of 2008 as a means to build my vocabulary and self-expression. I kept it interesting by naming each daily post with a new word, courtesy of my daily "a new word a day" desk calendar, and used the new word in the post itself. Sometimes the word was cleverly used, but most of the time, I used the word incorrectly.

I stopped blogging on Wordpress during my first year of uni because I was completely disillusioned and quite possibly undergoing some early-life existential crisis. University was exposing me to all sorts of ideas, which led me to feel unoriginal and rather isolated. This completely threw me off blogging because I felt like I no longer had an authentic voice or view, and ergo any attempt at blogging was mere regurgitation of other people's view. Simply, there was no point to it. Also, I noticed that I tailored my blog to a specific audience, writing to appease others, and not really expressing myself. It was a weird dynamic that was not particularly conducive to an enjoyable, flowing blogging experience. So I stopped, set up a new domain and blogged (very) infrequently.

I left the blogosphere for about two years, and returned to it after my exchange year abroad. With a renewed sense of self and armoured with touch of confidence, I decided to challenge myself to write for myself, on a public forum once more. Feel free to have a read here if you wish.

It was fun to be blogging again. The spike in self-identity definitely made it a space where I could reaffirm my own values, but also embrace the self-doubt I was going through as a twenty-something year old (something that I still struggle through, and am now okay with). It allowed me to assert myself but also wallow in the complexities of life. It was a great place to dump all my thoughts and desires.

But the 30-Day Challenge proved challenging, especially towards the end. I found that I spent a lot of my day actively keeping tabs on what experiences/events/emotions to blog about. This made me feel like a wallflower, not really participating in life (in Chobsky's words). I became way too mentally stimulated to appreciate the little pleasures of life. I was also tired of looking for "exciting" things to blog about; the desire for more is tiring.

I realise now that there is so much value to keeping thoughts and experiences to yourself. Not in a non-sharing sort of sense, but in a way that allows our minds to simply observe things without doing anything else. Sort of like a sponge that absorbs water, there is something rather lovely about allowing our minds to take in what is before us, to hold it and simply let be without expressing anything else. I think there is a deep appreciation of life from us allowing our minds to do this from time to time. And this was something that was hard to do during the 30-Day Blogging Challenge. 

This is why I choose to blog at least one at week on this domain, as oppose to making it a daily blog. I have chosen to value my own thoughts and mind, and allow things to foster and brew. I also carry around a notebook to jot down any thoughts that are ready to be elaborated.