Why I Blog

So, you know how periodically, I question why I do this blogging/writing thing? You know, given that I'm not sure it counts as a career, regardless of the amount of time I spend on it. Well, a new reader who is also a writer (Farm Suite --do y'all know her? You will.) asked me a question and in answering her, I kind of figured it out. She asked, "...how did you end up writing a column about your personal life... and being okay with everyone knowing that stuff?"

This is a slightly edited version of my answer to her incredibly insightful question. Because I know you all are DYING to know. (Oh, hush up and just hit delete. There's no need to get mean.)

I think there are a whole lot of factors that went into making me the kind of writer I am. As I started thinking about your question, I kept coming up with more and more of them.

One is that when I was a girl, I had a very serious eating disorder that thrived in secrecy. And the more secret I kept it, the bigger and more unmanageable it became. But when I finally started talking about it, I recovered from it. (Well, more or less. Still have some after-effects.)

Another is that I have big issues with being heard. Maybe this is from being the youngest of four or maybe it's because of the way I talk or something but I feel sort of invisible about half the time. Seriously, in my own family, every single person will ask me a question and then either not listen to the answer or sometimes, get this, even walk out of the room when I'm in the middle of answering. I can't even get the DOG to listen. Maybe I talk too much or something? I don't know. But it seems like when I write, people HEAR me.

Probably the biggest thing that affected my writing and led to me writing personal essays was that I had an epiphany one time where I realized that when I withhold information about myself, it's almost always because I am afraid of being judged harshly by someone. And for ME, that's the sin of pride and it's my biggest failing. So I decided to just stand naked in front of the world, so to speak, with all my faults and dumb mistakes and missteps right there under the fluorescent lights. Sometimes this is harder than others but I don't want to live my life inauthentically in the eyes of my God.

This isn't always easy. My husband is a VERY private person and he appears in both my columns and my blog with some regularity. He's not so happy about that. So I try to respect his privacy but still live "out loud" so to speak. It's a tough thing to balance, especially right now when he's about 85% of my adult interaction.

In the end, I keep blogging and writing because a very odd thing happened when I started talking about my darkest or deepest and silliest stuff-- it turned out that there were actually a lot of people out there who could relate and who felt somehow better knowing that they weren't the only ones who...whatever it is. And I developed this audience of people. Sometimes they tune in just because my work makes them feel a lot better about their own lives! I had a reader tell me that she loved to go read my blog because she always knew that no matter how crazy her day had been, mine was probably worse. (I'm not sure that was a compliment exactly...) So, I sort of see it as my mission to do what I can to bring down the false barriers between people, especially between mothers because we really are all much more similar than we realize. And a lot of people think the exact same things I write about but maybe they can't express them. It makes me happy to think that I can express it for them.

I never, EVER thought of myself as a humor writer. In fact, I STILL don't really think of myself as a humor writer. It's just that life is so FUNNY. And also, the best and fastest shortcut to building bridges between people seems to be a shared laugh. And then there's the concept I learned from one Jane Cooper (now 7) which is how amazing the power of positive energy is. That kid is going to take over the world.

So, this was probably way more information than you were looking for. But it actually really helped me to type all this out. I guess I knew all this stuff but there's something about writing the words, "my mission with my work..." that makes you realize you, um, actually HAVE one!

There, that wasn't so painful, was it? Tomorrow I'll be back to the absurd and I'll tell you how we paid darn good money to have a cabinet installed so that we could put the cat box in it. No, seriously.