A Mission Statement

Like so many aspiring writers, I can tell you that I have always been drawn to writing. Again, not unlike many of my fellow wordsmiths, from a young age, I have written stories, poems, and kept prolific journals (in my case, the latter only in spurts of a few months at a time), hoping to gain some sort of understanding about my world from my scribbled thoughts. And although a deeper comprehension about my place in the remains somewhat elusive, writing can still calm me better than a great conversation with a trusted friend, or even a good long rant or cry.

Yet even though I love putting “pen to paper,” I have always been uncharacteristically wary about sharing my work with the wider world. I will be honest here: though I love to write, I do not consider myself a particularly gifted or talented writer. I have been blessed with teachers and professors who have pushed me to develop the confidence to try publishing, but I am painfully aware of my own shortcomings: my tendency to use the passive voice, or my overuse of adverbs and adjectives stick out as evidence of how much I still have to learn. I do not want to be another crappy wannabe writer.

Complicating matters, I am simultaneously amazed and irritated by the proliferation of poorly written material that floats around the Internet these days. I am fascinated by the self-serving, narcissistic quality of blogs, and I have been surprised by my feelings of admiration or affection or hatred for these anonymous voices, known to me only by the words they self-publish. It boggles my mind to think that a person’s diary, or hastily typed comments that accompany a photo journal of shoes worn each day can turn into years' worth of written material.

In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote a blog for a short time while I was completing a practicum requirement for my master’s degree in public health. I was working in India, and maintained the blog during the time I was away in order to keep in touch with my family and friends. Again, being perfectly honest, I felt somehow that keeping this blog was an acceptable form of communication, rather than another nobody oversharing intimate details of their lives.

And though I shared details about my life, I still loved writing every word on that blog. I waited eagerly to read comments on my work, glowed when it was positive, and was shocked by how angry I felt when an anonymous reader left condescending comments about a few of my posts. It was a skin thickening, self-esteem boosting, and wholly rewarding experience.

While I wanted to keep writing the blog when I returned from India, I felt funny transitioning the blog from a travelogue into one that fit into my daily life. I can’t quite explain this except to say that I didn’t want to be another outlet for ritual navel-gazing or a mundane recitation of my day’s events, though I had indulged in both of those while writing the India blog. I wanted to write SOMETHING MAJOR, which is as asinine and pretentious as it looks written here.

So in the interest of pursuing my own ridiculous quest for literary perfection, I’ve kept silent and not shared my writing for two years(!). During that time, I’ve become an avid reader of many blogs, both group-written and individually-penned, both sparkling with witty originality, and riddled with clichéd turns of phrase and stock observations. Though I read everything, I comment rarely, and this makes me a “lurker” in blogging parlance, which is a word that is completely the opposite of my real-life personality.

However, rather than being a sign of how coolly detached I am about the world around me, I’ve realized lurking is a sign that I am growing slowly complacent, and less likely to engage with people and ideas. This is unacceptable to me: I don’t want to be a consumer of someone else’s thoughts. I want to produce my own ideas. To be as melodramatic as humanly possible, I am afraid that I am wasting away slowly, watching my brain grow sluggish with each day that passes without my expending any real creative effort.

Continuing the melodrama: I am 29 years old and completely afraid of becoming dead inside.

So I’m throwing a lifeline out into the world in the form of another unneeded blog. In academics, we would call this an independent directed study. The topics are varied, the observations and thoughts are all mine, and your comments, be they constructively critical or laudatory, are welcome.

Let my education begin again.