Daily Archive for Saturday, July 17th, 2010

Why do I blog?

I’ve asked myself that several times over the years. Most of the time, I don’t get a good answer from my own brain, and I usually forget. However, I’ve been blogging for long enough, I think I have a better answer.

I started blogging in early 2002. At the time, I was a simple freshman at Arapahoe High School. As anyone who’s attended high school knows, this is an incredibly tumultuous time in everyone’s life, full of loathing, self-doubt, and racked with the pain of isolation, no matter how many friends you have. I had plenty of friends, but none who could help me with my issues; their brand of “help”, just like many males in their early teenage years, would have been to make fun of me. I was tired of bottling things up so I signed up for a fledgling service named LiveJournal, where my account still lives but gathers quite a bit of dust.

During my high school career that ended in May 2005, I had many different blogs besides the one on LiveJournal. Many of them were on Blogger, and served some sort of specialty purpose that was eventually abandoned. Around the time Google was making financial passes at Blogger, my mother signed up for a web hosting service for her family history website, and I self-hosted a WordPress blog there while the software was still in beta. This blog did have all my posts and many comments from the LiveJournal and Blogger days, but inevitably there were some things lost during the transition.

Right after I left high school, I got a job and found a different host for my blog – DreamHost – that offered a huge amount of disk space and bandwidth at very reasonable rates. One of the first things to be set up was the move from http://matt.vandusens.us/blog/ to http://blog.mattfast1.com/. Even today, accessing the former will take you straight to the latter – meaning anyone following the old links could be assured of getting new content.

Today, I would say the main purpose of my blogging is therapeutic. It allows me to get my thoughts out into the open on any subject I wish. Blogging also allows me to express the thoughts I can’t express in 140 characters or less, that probably need to be better explained. As I spent the day yesterday reviewing posts from over 5 years ago that are now marked private, I would say that was the point all along. I’m pretty sure I’ve grown both as a writer and as a person during the past 8 years blogging, and I intend to keep that trend going. During these 8 years, blogging has been about the only constant in my life: jobs, schools, homes, cars, relationships, and friends are all examples of what have come and gone since I started (virtually) penning my thoughts. I’ve had things to regret, and things to celebrate.

Let’s see what the next 8 years bring…