I’ve been insisting for the last couple of years that I would not be a blogger.
But here I am!
Again.

Its not that I have anything against blogging.
I like to read blogs. I like to follow blogs.
(Much of it is silly self-obsessed exhibitionism. But oh, how entertaining that can be!)
I just haven’t wanted to be a blogger.
I say that I don’t believe that I have that much of interest to share with the big world wide web at large. (Which, deep down, I don’t believe in the slightest. But inasmuch as the litany feels like a battle against the slippery slope to vanity, I repeat it.) My quick answer is that I don’t have a big enough ego. (By which I actually mean, to myself, that I’m not enough of an exhibitionist.)
I’ve read the articles about the changing nature of intellectual discussion; the internet; social networking; sharing. Globalization. The citizen’s response to the decline of traditional media. The new paradigm of personal “discovery” seceding psychoanalysis. From the political commentary to the personal narrative, I enjoy blogs.
I mean, I totally “get it”.
The thing is – I’m just too vain to blog.
I enjoy being my generation’s exception to personal-branding and social-network addiction. I make fun of my friends who check Facebook on their phones and proudly say that I regularly de-friend anyone with whom I wouldn’t otherwise speak.
After all, who cares what I’m up to? (Other than my family and I promise – I’ll Skype my grandparents. Really soon.)
It’s not even like I haven’t had blogs…
But those, I tell myself, those were different – I was travelling!
It was interesting! It was worthy!
And not blogging, when I’m home, is itself a way to define the end of the trop. It’s part of my “home-coming” and “settling in” routine and it falls somewhere in between unpacking the suitcase, emptying the camera card, and getting over jet-lag: I write the last blog post and sign off.
Why would I blog from home, about boring daily life? I mean – I’m a college student, so the stuff that isn’t boring, isn’t really the stuff I want to put online.
The first time I blogged was the first time I left the country on my own – at least, for a long time. I took off for Tanzania the summer between my junior and senior years of high school for a six weeks. Nearly everyone thought I was crazy (the rest thought my mother was, for letting me go). I promised I’d stay in touch and I was web-savvy, and wordpress was just so much more convenient than mass emails. Between living with a local family, teaching English, working in an orphanage, going on safari, and getting face-to-face with wild chimpanzees… I had plenty to write home about.
The second time also involved exotic, distant lands. I graduated high school (and after working 60 hr weeks for six months), flew to Thailand. I did the typical gap-year “circuit” (plus two weeks in Burma, some volunteer work in Nepal, and trekking in Borneo) for seven months.
Blogging began as a way to let everyone at home know that I was still alive. It sort of took off on its own from there – in a way that, at the time, confused me. And even made me feel a bit guilty.
By the time a few complete and utter strangers had posted some flattering links (even, I swear, the Washington Post – not that I can find it now, so you’ll have to take my word at it – might just be delusional) and one rather prominent travel networking site offered me an internship (which I, regrettably, didn’t follow up on), I got a bit of stage fright.
I stopped going to internet cafes. (Two muggings and three passports into a seven month backpacking trip, they were nearly out of my budget.) And, to be entirely honest, I barely journaled the last few months.
I’d like to say I’d had an epiphany, inspired by Eastern philosophies, regarding the nature of experience and living in the moment. I’d like to say that, given that the majority of my blogging tended to focus on the people I’d met and the stories they told me, I started to wonder about my right to write it all down. I’d like to say that it was an existential realization in which my inner anthropologist gave up and just “went native”.
Those all played a role, I’m sure. Really though – I just got a bit bored – and a bit tired of trying to top myself.

Long story short – I stopped blogging.
Picked up again last summer, back in East Africa. (Three months this time – archaeological excavation on an island and reconnecting with all the people I’d met years before.) I had a wonderful go at it- travel has always been my muse – and all those lovely fantasies of one day seeing my name in print began to resurface. (I was titling the novels. I was negotiating the film rights.)
I was inspired, in a half-dozen different directions – right up to the point, and even past, that I found myself being air-lifted out of the country for medical treatment. One emergency operation, one first-class flight back to England, a month of sleeping on friends’ sofas and desperately apartment-hunting, a post-diagnosis of typhoid fever, and a new school term later…. blogging moved so far down the to-do list that I convinced myself I didn’t even want to.
Then I let my website go offline. Then I even stopped journaling.
Blogging, in my head, was all about sharing an adventure.
It didn’t matter that I hadn’t finished. That I had more stories to tell. My stories – stories that I had been gifted, granted – by others and that I owed it to them to tell.
It didn’t matter that that I was still wandering around narrating and composing to myself.
Didn’t even matter that, technically, I’m still abroad (I live in England, now, study here in university, but my family lives in California).
Reverse-culture-shock and the hassles of daily life made me grumpy. I didn’t want to live in a nostalgic haze when I ought to be buckling down.
But people kept expecting me to blog. Kept asking me to blog. Kept assuming I had a blog.
I have extended family members who think I’ve stopped talking to them because they don’t get my blog posts anymore. (No, I just haven’t written in a year. No, I haven’t blocked you from my website – there’s no way to do that – I just haven’t paid the bills so it’s gone offline.)
I meet people who, within five minutes, and absolutely no prompting and reason to think I would have one, ask for a link to my blog.
Confessional narrative – or political commentary?
There seem to be roughly two camps of bloggers: the ones who troll their personal lives for fodder, and the ones that troll the headlines.
(The best, most readable, and most astute out there, of course do both – talk about the world but share their personal connection; in one sweep pinning the topic down, relating to it, and proving themselves worthy of having an opinion on it.)
Confessions are, after all, a form of currency – a measure of authenticity, sincerity, and honestly. Weild them well, wave them carefully – and the world is your oyster!
Face-to-face, a well-timed personal disclosure can turn your conversational partner into an open book (it takes a very strong person not to feel the pull of “tit for tat” when you’ve shared a secret – after all, you’ve just shown yours…).
Online, particularly in a “broadcasting” sort of format (as I would consider blogging; despite the comment threads, its still all about the “speaker” and the “audience”), confessing builds an immediate sense of intimacy between people who, let’s face, have no real give-and-take reason to feel like they’ve built a bond.
And even better (more powerful) than your dirty laundry is the positive, up-beat,rendemption tale – going through Hell, coming back alive.
There’s more than a small element of exhibitionism smeared across the entire endeavor. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Exposure can be healthy – cathartic, at the least, to write it up and share it – and if you end up earning some cred – why not? Make that shadenfreude work for you. (Come on, you know you deserve it!)
I don’t mean to be as dismissive as I sound, not to characterize the personal narrative blog as reality tv’s prodigal cousin.
There’s a lot more going on than that, after all.
The personal essay has a long and respectable history. And where would literature – or any form of art? – be without a good pinch of the confessional?
False prophets and the Ivory Tower
Then there’s the editorial-op-ed camp of self-styled experts.
From good ol’ politics to science to video games, they just want to share what they know. Passionate about their subject and armed, like any good missionary, with an arsenal of quotes, anecdotes, testimonials, endorsements, and evidence. They’ve done their homework, too, most of them. They’ve been blessed with a voice; they’e built their own pulpits.
It’s all very democratic. It’s all very socialist. To the internet from the city square! The Everyman is here, here in the blogosphere. The Everyman is us and we are speaking. We are speaking out! (And if some of us are speaking louder than others? So be it.)
Yet, there is a piece of me that is slightly unnerved. I don’t want to sound elitist – but whatever happened to respect for expertise?
Where is audience? Who is the audience? When is the audience?
I think what’s always scared me the most about blogging is the seemingly infinite nature of the audience.
Any sort of traditional artistic performance is just that – a performance. Lights on, curtain up; whether you’re doing Shakespeare or your own spoken-word poetry, you have a fairly good idea of who’s listening. I think this is particularly true for the more off-the-cuff types of entertainment – stand-up comedy and political debate – everything is aimed and pitched, calibrated, for response.
It’s a bit trickier, online, to hit a target. Especially if you don’t have much of one. While you might open a blog on a specific website with certain interests – you know – you just know that the whole rest of the world wide web is out there.
One massive faceless-nameless-collective audience.
Of course, we shouldn’t even care about who’s listening or who’s reading. We ought to be writing to ourselves. (But we very rarely leave ourselves flattering comments and its a lot harder to increase your page count all by your lonesome.) Everybody wants some feedback. We’re all comment-junkies.
But perhaps I’m just projecting…
I’ve got my own issues.
I’m a student – an entrenched one, at that, and looking at a career in academics. I’m not so jaded as to have washed the stars out of my eyes when it comes to expertise and artistry. I’ve got a while ahead of me – and I want to feel those degrees be worth something, after I’ve earned them.
And I think it may be that I find blogging threatening.
Not anyone elses’ blogs – and not even blogging, in general. The idea that I, myself, my young and un-awarded self could blog (something other than a travel story).It’s absolutely irrational, but the longer I consider it, the more sense that it starts to make: if I’m so great now, why am I bothering with school?
Take that, and add to it the “burden” of the “gifted” and precocious “child” – with a dash of existential angst regarding my place in the universe.
You see, I’ve always had a bit of a problem with my age. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve looked it.
I just turned 21, but since 15 I’ve been able to “pass” for 20. (Maybe I didn’t always look the part, but I seemed to act it. It was in how I spoke and how I carried myself – I wasn’t doing it on purpose; people just assumed.) I’ve got friends now, whom I’ve known for a couple of years, who were surprised to find out my age at my birthday party. I’m much more comfortable with people five to ten years my senior – not that my peers are in their teens anymore, but… I never knew what to make of teenagers (nor they of me).
(A few years may not sound like much – but, trust me, when you’re 17, it’s all the difference in the world.)
And that’s the thing. I’m not 16 anymore. And being confident and opinionated aren’t going to get me “in trouble” for “pretending” to “be older. I don’t need to feel guilty about it. It’s not a lie – not even a lie of ommission – to be anything but self-effacing.
I’m entering my last year of my BA. I’m planning on a PhD.
I have no idea how I’m going to support myself through the rest – and, if I’m committing to it, it would be incredible to do something more interesting than serve coffee. (Or wait tables. But do you have any idea how hard it is to get a job waiting tables, these days, in this economy? Any job for that matter – and I’m not even that overqualified, but I’m overqualified enough, for the service industry.)
I am the internet generation, and its time to live up to the fact. (I need to get on this whole social networking thing, like, yesterday.)
When I apply to grad school, I will be googled. Employers will look for my online presence. They may even read my blog – at least skim it.
And that’s not a bad thing, at all.
After all – I’m equipped to manage it. I have fun doing so.
And why not?