Blogging less, thinking more, and oh wait, SQUIRREL COSTUME
A version of this post also appears at the Identity Theory editors blog.
Not to say I post with great regularity, but I may end up posting less going forward. I rediscovered the virtues of journaling, which is slower, more reflective, and more private. For about five years—from the end of high school through my first year or so in Boston—I wrote in a journal nearly every day. And since then I’ve made the mistake of thinking a blog would fill the same function. But there’s a gulf between making frustratingly slow curves on a page, forcing thinking to remain coherent as it flows in ink, and the disorientingly fast characters between divs, plunks on a keyboard all too easily outpace one’s own ideas.
Put another way, I spent my late teens and early 20′s learning how to talk candidly to myself, only to mistake blogging for the same action. But it’s not. Blogging is public. I know it’s public as I write each post. And I think of family and friends reading and reacting. Blogging has its place, but it doesn’t help the writer organize his or her own personal thoughts, and organizing those thoughts feels more and more as I get older like a precondition for being a good friend, family member, and husband. You need your own thoughts in order before you can be fully available to other people—rather like prayer.
Nevermind all that for now. WE JUST TOOK PHOTOS OF GATSBY IN HER SQUIRREL COSTUME.
And to quote my 8th grade English teacher: “And they ask me why I drink…”
