When I conceived of this blog (ha ha), I knew I would post early on about why I’m blogging, more for myself than for anyone else. I wanted to record my motives at the start, as best I could describe them, with the idea that I’d compare this post to another of a similar nature later on. Sort of like a time capsule, or writing yourself a letter during freshman year of high school that will be mailed to you upon graduation.
There are a couple of reasons I choose to blog at this point in my professional, personal, and writing life. The foremost is that I think it will be useful in all three sectors to have a self-imposed, yet semi-public system to hold me accountable to writing a prescribed amount (about 500 words) on a regular schedule (three times a week). This is helpful just for the sake of discipline, what with deadlines and a recordable measure of productivity, plus the practice of gathering my thoughts concisely and interestingly should improve my writing and other modes of communication overall.
The second reason is that I finally feel like I have something to write about. I am a young, married, Catholic woman, living and working in New York City, and expecting my first child. Of course, I understand that I am not the only person who fits this description, but I do hope that my perspectives on family, faith, work (whatever that may mean), and happiness in general will provide fodder for conversation both within and outside of this blog. I hope to appeal to folks who aren’t in my situation, and to offer some insight into a less common life. Lofty goals, I know. But I also know that I do not want simply to write, I want to write something meaningful.
The third and final reason is one I didn’t quite realize until the other night. I’d just finished writing when John came home. Usually there’s something I can’t wait to tell him at the end of the day, but this time, the “thing” I couldn’t wait to share—that I’d published my first blog post—was accompanied by a smile like the Cheshire cat’s that I felt bursting out of my face. I was so happy to have created something new, to have shaped my thoughts into a something that felt relevant and true, to watch something that I didn’t entirely expect appear under the quick strokes of my fingertips.
So the moral of the story is that I’m here to write. My writing hopefully means someone reading, and hopefully someone getting something fruitful out of it, but I’m trying not to get too caught up in all that quite yet. Right now, the goal is to write, edit, rewrite, rewrite, and hit “publish.”
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