blogging

I began my blog with the intention of keeping my friends and family up to date on our lives while we are living so far away. Before I discovered blogging I would send long emails to various friends and family. Most never really replied. I think for the most part they found my attempts to stay in contact to be annoying. Like I was expecting them to do the same and they were not predisposed to writing. Blogging allowed me the opportunity to write about my adventures, keep a diary I guess, without annoying my family. If they are interested they can read about stuff without feeling put upon.

So the first six months or so of blogging I would only blog when I had gone on an adventure or if something big happened. I did however begin to read other people's blog. I discovered Dixie at a time when she had taken a pledge to blog daily for a certain number of weeks. I really enjoyed going to her blog everyday and finding something new, guaranteed. I learned a little bit of the possibilities of blogging. It doesn't just have to be a newsletter to the family. It could be a place where I say what I think about all kinds of things.

I believe that before I could actually speak I would sit in my crib frustrated by what others were saying. To this day I am often frustrated by what everyone else is saying. I watch movies, TV, read books, newspapers and blogs. I hear the opinions of so many people and don't feel like my opinions are being expressed. I always have something to say about everything. Most of the time my odd thoughts cause me to loose friends.

Before I blogged I would express my odd thoughts via conversations and emails. Before I blogged I would all of a sudden lose a friend or person I conversed with out of the blue. People don't tend to tell me, Marsha I don’t agree with a word you say, therefore I will never speak to you again. They just disappear from my life. I never know what it is that I have said to offend them. As I began to blog for real. As I found a way to say the things on my mind via the blog instead of to all the poor people who happen cross my real life path. I began to discover something new. People tell me what they think. Instead of walking away shaking their head, I have actually learned a thing or too from my blogging friends.

I have learned that what I am saying and what people are hearing me say are often very different things. Much of that is my fault from poor presentation, but a little of that is that people tend to hear things through their own filter. I have learned that you have to know your audience in order to actually get a message to them. You have to know how they are going to interpret what you say and make allowances for their filter in order to be heard. I have also learned that my filter causes me to see the world in a way that makes me feel alone, like I am the only one who feels the way I feel. When in truth I have a lot in common with a lot of people. I am learning to listen and learning how to communicate.

All that aside as I make blogging friends, I have started to care about these people. I realize that the people we are on our blogs is different than the people we are in real life. I read the blog of someone who I know in real life and was shocked by the fact that while everything she said on her blog was 100% true and accurate, the things which were not said, caused the things which were said to appear in a different way. She came across as a sweet, shy, poor me, when in truth she is a very strong personality who is very much in charge of every room she enters. I realize that all my blogging friends are really different people in person, but I still like our blogging relationship. People who come by and leave comments, or people whose blogs I read and enjoy following their story. I would miss them if our blogging relationship were to end. This is causing me to edit myself a lot. I am so worried about saying the things I think, I find I no longer have very much to say. I find that I am so afraid of being me that I have become someone I don’t really know, on my blog. It is a lot easier to put yourself out there when you don't have any friends because there is no one to reject you.

I was telling this all to my dad on the phone the other day and he told me that he doesn't agree with half of the things I say on my blog, but he still reads it. Probably the same is true about all of you. That you already think I am nuts and still are my friends so what does it matter what I say.