I blog therefore…

Why, oh why, do I blog? No seriously, why do I blog? I must ask myself that question a dozen times each week (scrub week and replace with day) and I’m not alone; one of the things I’ve noticed about the blogging fraternity is that lots of them have no idea why they do it.

Of course there are bloggers out there who have a message, a specialist subject, an interest, even a cause; but I’m not one of those. If there is any theme at all to my blogging activity it is ‘me’ and, as I often remind what I laughingly call my readers, it is all about me. So, I guess in some ways you might call it a vanity blog, me showing off - “Look everyone here I am. Take notice, I’m jolly interesting.” Of course the truth is I’m mainly only interesting to myself and my random collection of thoughts, comments, memories, stories, cries for help, and nonsense generally goes unnoticed. It doesn’t stop me though – I’m what you’d call a compulsive blogger, mangling myself with the agony of composing a post almost each and every day.

At first I fooled myself that I was simply blogging for ‘me’, pretending that it didn’t matter if anybody else ever read what I’d written. But you can only fool yourself for so long and it soon became obvious I needed the drug of readers and their comments. Sometimes my need for a comment fix gets so bad that I’ve found myself commenting on my own posts, fishing on Facebook and Twitter to drum up interest, even asking my daughter to comment. Sad - I really am desperate for attention it seems – roll up, roll up, read all about me!

On a luvvy note, some of it is about creative release. My blog drives me to try and do something creative each day, even though I fail sometimes – words and drawings, photographs and sculptures – and to be honest that can only be a good thing can’t it? Well, not according to my wife who says I am obsessed and that blogging, and the activities associated with it, take up far too much of my time. She’s right of course but just as my vocation in life is blogging, her vocation is never being seen to be wrong.

Then there’s the part of my blogging habit that’s about keeping a record, not in a Sammy Pepys diarised way – my life isn’t that interesting - but a daily account of me at a moment in time. It’s kind of a repository, a place to go if anyone ever wanted to know me in years to come, a place to go to understand the feel of who I was. Maybe something for my grandchildren to ponder over, who knows? I do know that if you look hard enough, between the lines and in the code, that you’ll find pretty much everything there is to know about me and even some that there isn’t.

So, why do I blog? Well, I’m still thinking about that one, but if I was really pushed for a single statement answer to that particular question it would be: "I blog, therefore I am." Yes, my blog is more me, than me, will ever be.