Dear Diary,
My online friend, Snooty Primadona, asked herself - and all of us - why we blog.
And, as they say, she got me to thinkin'.
Why do I blog?
I think it's because, deep down, I'm a creative person, and that creativity has always expressed itself through writing.
Languages, and the way people express themselves using them, has been an endless source of fascination for me. When I was a kid at school, English was my favorite subject, closely followed by French and Afrikaans.
The fact that people chose to assign gender to nouns interests me. La table is feminine, whereas le chien (dog) is not.
The fact that you have to say no twice in Afrikaans interests me too. They use a double negative. Ek het dit nie gese nie (I didn't say it).
How people expressed themselves through words - the art of prose - was something I grew to love. Dickens' humor, Shakespeare's prose-poetry and Judy Blume somehow getting into my head and helping me work through the difficult parts of being a teenager.
The more I read, the more I realized that writing can be as much about working through things for yourself as about telling stories. I never had a diary as a kid - I'd start one and then not take the time to keep doing entries - but I wrote a book when I was about 12. It's somewhere in my stored stuff. I seem to remember it has something to do with a boy and my transformation when my braces came off.
After High School, when studying English at University became about analyzing the writing of others, I never wrote creatively for years. I guess I didn't need to. I was having fun growing up, getting out into the world, travelling.
But then I got into the corporate machine.
I was working in a large company, dealing head on with a matrixed hierarchy, 15 hour days, business travel, working on weekends, useless meetings, yearly goal-setting and reviews and a curve on which my team-mates and I were graded for bonuses so we were effectively in competition with each other to get our projects noticed by our managers. Bureaucracy and office politics seemed to stifle any creative or artistic thought.
Even emotions had to be regulated - one had to appear enthusiastic and be PC at all times, no matter what you were feeling or what was going on in your life. This was particularly difficult for me after I had major surgery and went back to the office too early. Consequently, I was labelled "a bad fit" and my work life became even more restricted.
It was all looking a bit bleak, dear Diary, until my therapist suggested I find a way to write again.
I'm not the kind of person who can set up a story outline, develop characters and have the self-discipline to produce a novel. I admire the people who do. My creativity comes to me in little bursts: observations, jokes and the need to vent.
And so, the blog.
And that, dear Diary, answers the question.
Ittybittycrazy