iiiiiiiiii'm coming out.... of the blogging closet!

I set up this blog in 2003.  Posted a few emails I wrote from India in 2007.  Started writing in 2008.  Stopped in 2009.  Came out in 2010.

Truth is I haven't told a single soul I know about the blog, and I only set it to public recently.
I've been an aspiring journal-keeper for as long as I can remember.  I was always in awe of the ability to preserve moments in time.  As a child I owned a marble notebook and aspired to write like Ramona Quimby (was it her?).  In my tweens, I typed my thoughts on our first computer, inspired by Doogie Howser, M.D.  I read Anne Frank's and Zlata's Diary as a kid... and somehow I got the impression that keeping a journal meant sticking to details.  I think writing details exhausted me... so I gave up.

In 2003 I spent the summer in Texas and Mexico doing an intensive six week meditation and yoga training program and then volunteering in poor communities.  I could feel myself changing, and it was then that I began to understand the value of journaling.  The ability to preserve my personal growth through my revelations, the evolution of my thoughts, perspective, outlook, and philosophy on (my) life suddenly seemed invaluable.  And for six weeks I wrote every night.

I've always been one to contemplate life.  And sometimes I find myself mentally composing my thoughts into journal-like entries.  I always intend on transferring the entries to a more reliable medium... but they inevitably get lost in the recesses of both time and my mind.

Part of the reason I'm a closet blogger is because I'm not utterly convinced strangers should want to read my ponderings on life, love, education, politics, spirituality, nature, society, culture... and if they aren't strangers, I'm not sure I'm ready to share.
Just because I find life fascinating enough to write about, should others really be fascinated enough to read?  If I was a writer perhaps I could seamlessly stitch prose to keep readers rapt with attention, but I'm not.  And I like writing raw, uncensored, unedited... unworried about offending others, or expressing myself inaccurately. And while I'm not one to care what others think, I tend to want what I do chose to share, to be both accurately expressed and understood.

I've never been an blogo-sphere surfer.  And I never followed any blogs.  But mindless web-surfing a few weeks ago found the closet blogger wanna-be in me inspired and itching to write again... and to come out of the closet.

The truth is that keeping my blog in hiding allows me to avoid commitment.  But perhaps my current need for creative expression, commitment to a project outside my daily life, and exercising my use of the English language are just the push I need.  (I've been living abroad for so long that even the writing of this post required the occasional translation and dictionary reference.)