The range and diversity of blogs never ceases to amaze me and I often wonder what’s motivating the bloggers to blog.
I’m talking here about ‘personal’ as opposed to business blogs.
The key question that underpins this matter is how much it matters to you whether people read your posts or not.
I’d love to hear your views.
I only realised quite recently how having a ‘personal’ blog can take the slog out of doing everyday chores that are a challenge to sanity.
Yes, I know that some people love hoovering, washing saucepans, dusting, emptying the rubbish, cleaning the bathroom, de-frosting the freezer, searching for socks ….. but I just don’t.
Soooooooooo, where does the blog fit in? Well, I’m finding that the worse the chore, the more I’m leaning into it to draw out fresh angles, memories, inspiration, fun, musical, poetic, artistic and dance connections.
So, as I brace myself to attack the fridge which is full of good intentions gone to gunge, I’m planning to do it to music which will have me bopping around the aisle kitchen ~ it just has to be Buddy Holly ~ and thoughts of that great summer afternoon in London at the Buddy Holly Story.
Pencil and notebook will sit on the counter to catch the flow of thoughts as my gloved hands and masked face burrow into the volcanic mountain that may well explode like early Halloween fireworks at the very first touch.
Ah Halloween …. now there’s a thought! Trick or Treat?
It’s been a roller-coaster of a few days at a number of levels and I felt it best not to write here as I felt I could say things that I might later regret. Perhaps some bloggers operate at a far more distanced, professional level than I do and press ahead with posting no matter what’s going on. I could certainly do that if this was a different type of blog but one of the features of a ‘Personal Blog,’ as I see it anyway, is that they mirror what’s going on in the writer’s mind/heart ~ or else demand that one dons a mask and that’s not really something I’m very interested in doing.
Anyway, last night I had the most delicious swim at high tide in Garrarus and it seemed to wash away the angst. It was one of the highest tides of the year and I was there just as night was closing in.
As I lay floating over the big, friendly waves, the words ‘Give Thanks’ came to me. They always make me smile because way back in the early 1980s, I yearned for a pine bed but being an impoverished student such a luxury seemed way beyond my grasp.
However, I put all my faith and trust in a friend who knew all about horses and he swore that a horse called Give Thanks would win me the price of the bed over time if I invested the £5 I managed to scrape together from coins that I found in old purses, backs of drawers and down in the depths of ragged pockets.
Give Thanks was trained by Jim Bolger, who has gone on to be one of the leading trainers in the world of racing. Give Thanks and her jockey Declan Gillespie kept on winning for me and she even won the Irish Oaks, which is for three-year-old thoroughbred fillies, in 1983.
My pine bed materialised and was beyond precious in my little bedsit apartment in Dublin.
Last night, in lovely Garrarus, I gave thanks for all the good and the great things that have happened over the years and there have and continue to be many.
By the way, the ‘friend’ who spotted Give Thanks all those years ago became ‘hubby’ almost ten years later!
I’d love to know how other personal bloggers deal with writing/not writing when on an emotional roller-coaster? Do you pour it all out; write about something ‘objective’; refrain from posting or …..?
Do you find yourself grappling with the question of which ‘YOU’ to reveal in your blog posts or am I alone and palely loitering on this one?
Today had many, many shades to it. The weather was beautiful and I had the most divine swim in the sea under the midday sun at my precious Garrarus Beach:
There followed an exciting offer of a project relating to poetry which has set my heart on fire.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tideLate in the day came the sad, sad moment, that I hesitate to mention, when I collected the cremated ashes of my beloved Cavalier King Charles, Sophie, who died on January 11. They are in a box of a woodland with bluebells just like Newtown Wood, where she and I walked every single day right to the very end.
And this is just a glimpse of the ‘me’ that has woven her way through today.
So, which YOU do YOU reveal on your blog and which one do you hold back?
I’ve written about crushes here before and over the last week the subject has reared its complex head again.
In short, I received a package from a guy who developed a crush on me way, way back when I was in my early teens. The large envelope contained a Valentine card and decades worth of Valentine quotes. There was also a very well-penned letter in which he explained the flip side of crushes and how it feels as if a piece of the heart has been stolen by the object of the crush.
I really, really thought that I had made it very clear over those years that I never, ever wanted to be part of the crush or see it develop into anything. Maybe I didn’t convey my thoughts well enough or maybe there was a deafness to them.
Okay, I went into silent mode then hoping that that would convey the fact that this was an entirely one-sided affair. Having read the letter, I feel now that there is a need to bring closure by acknowledging receipt of the package and stating absolutely that I want to give back the piece of heart that it I appear to have unwittingly stolen.
Why write about it all here? Well, I don’t have (nor do I want) an address to which to write privately. Also, I feel that this sorry episode highlights the extent to which personal blogs, especially, can be misinterpreted and need to be written with a clear focus on what they may dig up from the past.
Do you ever wonder about the people behind personal blogs? I certainly do! And one question that creeps into my curious head is whether their posts are all sanitized and edited with the real version in a journal that they’ve stashed away in a lock-up somewhere.
I have to say I adore ‘real’ journals, especially ones with rich parchment-like paper that beg for a fountain pen and and thoughts, emotions, happenings that matter to the writer.
Yes, there’s great freedom in blogging but can one, or does one want to, wear one’s heart on one’s blog? I reckon personal blogs need heart and many of them have a helluva lot of it.
But I also think that lots of people need to be able to spill their whole heart out onto a page that will be as unconditionally loving and discreet as one’s faithful, empathetic dog who has witnessed and absorbed every mood swing imaginable.
Can a personal blog ever serve his/her master/mistress like a private journal? Are private journals becoming things of the past as personal blogs, either anonymous or otherwise, wrench open every conceivable topic and lay them bare in all their rawness?
SOCIAL BRIDGE ~ Jean Tubridy connecting with you from Ireland 