How much do we do out of deep conviction, and how much do we do because we think we should?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been using this blog as a corkboard of sorts, pinning up my ideas on my writerly motivations so that I can step back and process them. I’ve written about the ambition that drives my creating and most recently why that creating takes the form of words.

Over the past month, I’ve been reexamining the purpose of this blog. I began blogging a few years ago, and in my introspective way, quickly got all meta and decided to overthink it. As I skim back over old posts, Present Me realizes that Past Me had no idea what she was doing. Past Me had sort of heard that if you were going to write books, it was maybe good to have a social media presence so that if an agent Googled you, the first thing that popped up wouldn’t be the Facebook page of that person who has the same name as you but who is very possibly a stripper. But, in her usual idealistic way, Past Me quickly decided that this blog was all about connection but it was also all about accountability and also a pretty good place to put a bunch of stories about chickens. (I just Googled my name + chickens. I think I need an intervention.)

Blogging has become a complicated critter for me, with various motivations. Sometimes, to be honest, I feel very mercenary about it–I need to post because you have to be consistent because PEOPLE have decreed this for REASONS and therefore it MUST BE. And then sometimes I read comments and they mend little cuts and scratches in my soul, fill them with gold lovelier than the raw material like those patched Japanese teacups, and I realize that I am not alone in my reflective quirkiness, in the constant interplay of dark soul-nights and radiant dawns.

I’m still working my way through the question of what purpose this blog should serve. I ponder this with all my writing–who is it for? What is it for? What value am I adding to the world by flinging these words out into the void?

But the thing is that the void isn’t actually void. There are other voices in it, other conversations happening, other lives being lived. As any self-respecting void should be, however, it is vast, and it’s easy to miss something–hard, sometimes, to find anything.

At the end of the day, at the end of the post, though, what I am still always ultimately looking for is that connection, that spark that jumps the gap between two minds, two souls. The kind of spark that kindles fires that consume cities and crack open hard-shelled seeds and change the world.

It’s all about connection. Always. (But blogging is still tricksy and I still stand by this post, which I hereby decree my Blogifesto.)

Thank you for connecting with me.