Blogging, The New Journaling
Blogging has become my version of keeping a journal. People in therapy are often told to write things down, and I tried that route plenty of times. It never took. I have a small graveyard of notebooks, each one abandoned after a few entries. Something changes when there's a chance someone will read the words, though. Give me even the possibility of an audience and I can't stop writing.
Thinking on the page comes easier to me than thinking out loud. When a friend asks me for advice, I'll sometimes point them to my blog, and then I'll turn around and use their question as the seed for the next post. The blog ends up being two things at once: a record of my own trek through my psychology, and part of the reason I've made any progress at all.
The way I write is almost entirely by ear. I hear each sentence in my head as it comes out, then I go back, listen again, and patch or rework the parts that sound off. After that I'll drop in photos, pull up a preview, and try to give the thing something to look at. On days when I'm avoiding every other task on my list, writing is still available to me. Whatever crosses my mind during the day, along with a lot of what I've been reading, feeds into it. Once in a while I'll reread an older post and find one I'm genuinely pleased with, without any memory of having written it.
Years of reading and writing set me up for this online kind of journaling. I spent long stretches of my career dictating social histories straight through over the phone, working from my interview notes in a single pass. That habit probably explains why writing lives in my ear. Learning has always pulled at me; I own more books on self-help and mysticism than any one person has a reasonable need for. For most of my life I lived far from the cities where people gather for groups and workshops to study these subjects. The books filled that gap. They gave me years of material to chew on, and what sat quietly incubating for a long time has finally come up through the writing.