Confessions of a reluctant blogger

I’ll be honest: I didn’t really want to do #blogjune. Intrigued and tempted to be involved in a community project, most definitely; but desire to blog? It’s something I’ve struggled with. That sounds ridiculous stated like that, as if I were referring to a fundamental crisis of identity. But it’s a continuation of the squirminess I felt from primary school each time I decided I should keep a diary. There always seemed something so conceited in it; suggesting an assumption that later, someone would look back on it and say, ‘ah yes, we always suspected she was touched with the divine hand of brilliance and uniqueness at an early age’. The idea of going back and reading the embarrassing evidence of my dreary humanity didn’t made sense to me; my style has always been to get my thoughts onto paper, shove it in a draw and eventually throw it away. It never occurred to me that a diary could serve a purpose in chronicling daily life in a history-making purpose (I wish now it had). And because of my hang ups about audacity of public diarying, I guess I went along with the pejorative jokes about the narcissism of bloggers.

But along came Twitter. I’d gone along with Facebook for about five years, but suddenly there was this platform that was all about constructing an identity from scratch based on what I could say in 140 characters or less. Strangers followed me on the basis of what I posted. I was writing things that made people laugh, learn and reflect. I’d become part of people’s professional and personal support networks, and they mine. I was having an impact, just by opening my virtual mouth once in a while. A small but important piece fell into place when I realised was I was doing was, in fact, microblogging.

And out of this came a further, completely unexpected, development: I’ve recently become a musical blogger. Three months ago, six of us librarians on Twitter unintentionally formed a song challenge club. Once a week, a rostered person announces an artist, genre or theme and we get busy learning, recording and uploading our songs to Soundcloud. I’ll write about this another time, but the experience of adjusting to the identity of recording artist (no matter how small fry) has made the idea of blogging far easier to accept.

So while I signed up for #blogjune with certain residue apprehensions about blogging (not helped by technical difficulties), it’s all part of the continuum of me coming to enjoy being a creative contributor on the internet.