A Post for Posting’s Sake
““The struggle between poetry and prose is a constant in my life. If you obey the poetic impulse, you risk becoming unreadable. If you disobey, you’re ready for a career as an honest ‘storyteller.’””
In 2002, the terms Blog, Blogging, and Blogger were more often than not pejorative. Traditional outlets like The New York Times didn't have much respect for bloggers, and I can remember reading more than one op-ed predicting that blogs were a sign of the apocalypse. I suppose that if you happened to be a traditional reporter for a traditional newspaper during that time, they were probably right, but in any case, it's not without some irony that I reference an article published in the New York Times' OP-TALK section, which, let's face it, is a collection of blogs.
The article, titled "The Best Way to Get Over a Breakup," reports on a recent study published in a journal called "Social Psychological and Personality Science" (aka "Stuff a Thirteen-Year-Old Knows") which shows that writing about a breakup can help a person get over it.
"Writing?" About a "breakup"? Tell me more.
The time-honored tradition of writing about a breakup is precisely how I began keeping this blog in the first place — as an effort to define my post-long-term-relationship self. The article stresses that there's a fine line between self-reflection and self-indulgence and that dwelling too much on one's feelings can make everything worse. Although I'm pretty sure that's something I learned while keeping a journal in high school, I'll be the first to admit that it took time for me to find the balance when blogging. Eventually, though, I began to develop what the study calls "self-concept clarity" and, as time went on, the breakup became less and less important. I didn't stop blogging, though. When not writing about "feelings," I was writing about the minutia of my everyday life. But even that, according to the Times again, has its benefits.
A separate OP-TALK article from a few months ago entitled "How Keeping a Diary Can Surprise You" quotes psychologist James W. Pennebaker comparing writing about everyday things to making a bed: “Some people benefit because it helps provide a little structure and perhaps a self-evaluative tool.”
I'm sure I used to blog more regularly than I made my bed, so, for me, that was absolutely true. My schedule was "once a day and twice on Sunday," as they say, and it provided me with useful mental housekeeping.
These days, however, I only ever seem to post once every six or seven months. It's a trajectory of output fairly typical of personal blogs, as pointed out so correctly by my friend Elmo Keep in her article No One Cares About Your Personal Brand.
I've made a few half-hearted attempts at writing more regularly, but this time I'm determined to get the structure back — to write for myself, for my piece of mind, regardless of whether or not I have anything to say (as probably evidenced by the preceding paragraphs) and whether or not anyone has the patience to read it.
