Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 November 2007 08:02:08
I noticed yesterday that this wiblog had had it's b'day last week and was now 3 years since the first post . Now as is admitted frequently the writer is addicted to blogging, but why? What has blogging provided for this writer?
Firstly for me blogging provides headspace. Whilst I'm careful about what I write (generally) it is a space for me to think out loud and sometimes reflect on stuff.
Secondly it's allows me to be part of a community. The Wibsite is a community, a wonderful community of people I actually seem to have alot in common with. Whilst not wanting to generalise it is a space for 20 something to 40 something Christians who are desperately trying to keep going with faith and practice in a culture which increasingly doesn't understand and a church which has on occassion not understood. It's a community populated, not exclusively but largely, by single people or people who have married post 30 and so understand the issues involved. It's a community which values study either for a qualification or for enjoyment and it's a community where a significant proportion of us have had to deal with depression at some point in our lives. It's a community where a disproportionate number of us work in the public or voluntary sector. Which I guess is a rather long winded way of saying it's a community where I feel at home, in a world where I can often feel a stranger.
Thirdly it's a space where I can get creative, in some kind of way. When God was handing out gifts the boxes containing singing, sporting, practical or art abilities were clearly waiting to be refilled at the point when I reached them. However, there seemed to be a tiny bit of something left at the bottom of the writing box. Therefore the creative passion I have is writing. As somebody who's not particularly good at poetry and probably not good enough to write a book blogging is the ideal vehicle for me to use to get creative. Nobody else has to read it, but a small number of you are kind enough to choose to.
Forthly it allows me to update friends on what's going on in my life. As somebody who does not do facebook this is the nearest I get (although I have no idea who, if anybody who I know in real life regularly visits this site).
Finally it allows me to generally record some of the experiences I've had. Over the course of the three years this blog has been running it has included details of Gordon Brown's speech to the Make Poverty History campaigners in Edinburgh, my visit to the Baptist World do-dah in Birmingham where speakers included Jimmy Carter, a trip to Iona , starting and completing my MA , births and deaths of close relatives, a new job, Third Party moving up to secondary school, 3 Greenbelts and a uni essay examining it's role as a place of pilgrimage , numerous art exhibitions, Green Day's concert of a generation and too many book reviews as well as a load of junk inbetween. On days when I feel like I'm doing nothing with my life it enables me to look back and see that there is something going on.
So thanks to those of you I know and those of you I don't (which is just wierd) who keep coming back to read the ramblings of this 30 something, single mum, who chooses to talk about politics, religion, music, football and books in blog posts which are way too long and on occassion get a bit too weird.