It has been some time since I last wrote a blog post. Blogs were still a “thing,” then, I think, and while Tumblr and other microblogging tools had emerged, they hadn’t yet become the primary method for individuals to share brief snippets of their lives. Nor were blogs the province of collectives and corporations—it seems now that one only sees “blog” linked to sections of online newspapers and magazines, or even more perniciously as some face genre that’s become part to the educational sphere, like that imagined “blog” module that’s part of Blackboard LMS.
But I decided a few months ago that I might like to return to blogging for a number of reasons. One, I missed writing regularly. Over the last year (2017), I have written more words, perhaps, than at any other time, but all those words have been for book projects, articles, and chapters, and those words have come in fits and start, often binge writing to finish a project or meet a deadline. There’s something to be said for writing when you have to, for writing to meet deadlines or because you don’t want to disappoint a collaborator, but it also became clear to me that I was leaving too much thinking on a back burner somewhere as I waited for it to come together in some meaningful way, to be “useful.” What I loved most about writing over the nearly 10 years that I kept up with my “Sordid Blog” was that I didn’t have to rehearse it and be overly careful what I wrote. Frankly, I think I was braver back then than I am now. When I go back to read some of those old pieces, I’m a bit shocked at what I put out in the world. Some of it is really embarrassing, to be honest, and while I’ve never been a “regrets” sort of person, a couple of pieces now seem like terrible ideas. Because of the relentless spambots out there, I took the Sordid Blog down, though I may re-release it at some point, perhaps edited, perhaps not. Returning to blogging now — will this be successful? who knows? — then is about returning to regular writing, to putting down ideas even if they’re not polished, to keeping up with some of my thinking and not just letting everything go away into the ether.
Another reason to return is that I know I was happier when I wrote regularly. A number of studies have suggested that writing has therapeutic value, and when I wrote regularly (and not just for deadlines), I think I was, if not happier, at least more aware of what I was feeling and thinking. Or maybe “happy” isn’t the right word or emotion … balanced? level? aware? Maybe none of those either … maybe writing just made me think that among the chaos and lack of clarity, at least I had something going on, some way to focus or funnel my thinking.
And that’s what I think this new blog will be: a focusing tool. Also a tool for capturing and keeping up with things. I read so much on a regular basis and yet when it’s time to make use of that reading, it seems to have all disappeared. I hope that a return to blogging will help me keep up with my reading and my responses to those readings, to the initial thoughts I have while moving through books, articles, and website. I can’t imagine that this blog will be of much use to anyone who isn’t me, but as so much of my life is now “lost” to the invisible work of administration, perhaps this blog will help me to make some of that work visible even just to myself, but also a way to tag and track some of that work so that it may, at some point, become part of another project. Regardless, this blog will be a fusion of previous blogs. For a while, I tried to keep the Sordid Blog separate from my academic blog, “Florilegia,” because they had different goals/foci and the audiences who read along on the two seemed not to be interested in the other project. But the reality is that I was bifurcating my life in public writing spaces, and I was representing a life in discreet elements that isn’t that discreet at all, so going forward, I think it makes more sense to have one blog and to put everything in one place.
So here I am, ending 2017 by returning to blogging, by going back to the digital spaces that started my career as a teacher-scholar-researcher to see if I can find something useful again in the regular writing and thinking that come with keeping a blog. Blogging isn’t a 2018 Resolution because, really, who keeps those things anyway, but it is a hope that I’ll find writing useful again across different spaces in my life. Finger uncrossed, for easier typing, here we go …
