Blogger's Remorse

I hate my blog. It's not at all like I had envisioned it. It all seemed so romantic. Blogging...writing with complete freedom - no rules, no guidelines. But now, I hate that freedom, and it hates me. I feel like Red from "The Shawshank Redemption" when he finally leaves prison and his very freedom nearly drives him to suicide. I, too, have contemplated the ending of my own blog. I am frustrated, lost, and tired. For too many years, my writing has been constrained by the structure of academia; now, without that structure, it cannot support itself. My writer's hands are strong from years of stringing together words, but my writer's legs - the legs that guide a writer to new places, leading him to seek new things - are weak: they have been so long without use that they stumble on any foreign ground. This free ground, sadly, is very foreign indeed.

The question then becomes, will I go through with my blogocide? Will I surrender before I have really even begun to fight? No. I will press on. No matter how bad, how ungraceful, and how lost my words may become, this will still be The Success Blog, and if I gave up now, it would send a sad and hopeless message to myself and anyone who manages to accidently (or not) stumble onto my newfound freedom. So, I've decided to press on - masking old errors with new, replacing awkward wordy struggles with even more awkward, more wordy, ones. It will not be a method of perfectionsism, or even corectionism, but simply one of perserverism. I will continue to make up words to fit my sloppy style, and in doing so, the atrophied muscles of my writer's legs will slowly gain strength - now unsupported by the rules of academia - and will soon learn to carry me to new places.

Whether you decide do join me on such a journey is entirely up to you. The wonderful thing, however, is that whether or not I choose to embark upon such a journey is entirely up to me.

A short time ago, I managed to find a friend's blog which he had choosen not to outwardly advertise to his real-world aquaintances. To be honest, I enjoyed reading it, getting to know the author of the blog - a person related to (but not the same as) the friend I already knew. I told him I had found the blog, which in part, I belive, he expected me to find, but soon, he became upset with my reading the blog. I could understand this; after all, there is a difference between writing something for the world to read, and writing something for a neighbor to read. Nevertheless, I continued to read, and continued to be entertained, all the while hiding behind the anonimity of my own blog.

Then, in an appropriately retributive turn of events, my blog was found. My secret revealed. Right when I most hated my blog, when I was most glad of its abscurity, it is suddenly exposed, I have no idea how, within the very blog in which I had first started reading of my own friend's escapades. Now that I, too, am frustrated by the local publicity (be it on an individual scale), of my blog, I must try to remember what I had so confidently said while still in hiding. The beauty of a blog is not only in the freedom it grants its writer, but also, in the freedom it grants its reader. We all know how liberating, (and, for me, at present, difficult and intimidating) the complete freedom of a blog is, but this freedom is no different than a personal journal or diary. What sets the blogmedia apart is that it grants both total freedom to write and total freedom to read. Though, obviously, natural barriers like internet access and language differences stand between my blog and many readers, there are no artificial barriers like locks or subscriptions or passwords that allow only a select few to read whatever it is I write.

Thus, now thrust violently out of local anonimity, I find I must embrace this fate, as it is both the truth, and the success of blogging. Write away, writers; and read away, readers. I refuse to be ashamed of the self that this freedom exposes, and so I will continue to write, and, if you choose, you will continue to read.