Just Ruthie

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t blog nearly as often as I should. It’s the same with anything I do, really. Everything comes and goes in spits and spurts. Some days and weeks I’m really productive and self-confident and, dare I say, even a bit of an extrovert. Then there are the more common days where I retreat into my shell and stay there.

What I find is that those periods of retreat last much longer than the periods of out-going-ness (yeah, I know it’s not a word). When I’ve been in retreat mode for any length of time, it’s like I forget how to come out of it again. I worry that people will think I’ve been gone too long to start posting again. And then I worry that no one reads what I’ve written anyways, and so didn’t even notice that I was gone.

Over the last few weeks of retreat - the holiday season does that to me - I’ve been thinking a lot about why I even keep going, and who I blog for.

Do I want influence and attention?
That’d be nice, but it’s not really me.

Do I want to be a social butterfly and have lots of friends on my lists at lots of social networking sites?
Not likely… It’s not that I don’t want friends, I just wouldn’t be able to keep up with you all.

Do I just want to find my own voice and be confident enough in it to say what I have to say, and not care if anyone but me even reads it at all?
Now that sounds like me.

So I was quite happy to come across a post by Maki at Dosh Dosh recently that talks about voice and authenticity in blogging. (Thanks to Dr. Mani for pointing it out.) The article itself was enlightening — especially the part about recognizing that your voice changes as you strive to meet the perceived expectations of your audience. (I say perceived, because unless they tell you what they want to hear from you, then the expectations are only those that you perceive to be there.) What was even more eye-opening was reading the comments left by other. I have to admit, I’ve always felt very alone in thinking that I had to have something earth-shattering to say before I wrote a post.

It’s taken a few days for the message to really sink in, and for me to find a way out of my shell again. Now that it has, and I have, I can confidently say that I am blogging for myself, first and foremost. And while a little part of me hopes that someone other than myself is reading this, if you are, and if it resonates with you in some way, that’s well then that’s just the icing on my cake (chocolate, of course).

Who do you blog for? Add your voice — leave a comment.