As of today I’ve been doing this for six years. Happy blogday to me. This forum has allowed me to do something that I’ve tried to do with limited success over the years: reflect on my life in writing. As well it’s allowed me to return to photography and more recently, a kind of daily drawing and publishing.
Usually this time of year I express gratitude for the community I’ve found here on live journal, and that gratitude is still there for me, even though things have changed with the community a great deal. Lots of people on my friends list have jumped ship, and I myself have begun fashioning this into a much more public blog by moving it over to www.naylandblake.net . One nice thing is that the people who have stayed here have been the more committed posters: generally I find far fewer “personality quiz” memes appearing on my friends list. But the decrease of posting overall has diminished my sense of the chatty community newspaper I used to have. A certain portion of that seems to be happening on facebook, and even more casually on twitter. The migration to dreamwidth has also meant that some of the voices I most valued here are occupied elsewhere. On the plus side this year I’ve found a whole group of cartoonists on here who are posting great drawings, and it still remains the source for personal news about friends that I have come to care about deeply.
This next year I want to make this into a source of information about things other than myself: really how many times can we hear about whether or not I’ve done my laundry? The blogs I admire are those that bring me to information or opinion that I hadn’t encountered before. Sometimes that’s because someone is leading a remarkable life and reporting on it, sometimes it’s because they’re a brilliant researcher. I’m neither, but I’d like to find a way to be more of a resource.
So I’m not done yet. But maybe I feel more like a broadcaster than a teen crying in my pillow these days. And all of LJ seems a bit less intimate in the ways that made it exciting a few years ago, more information, but less surprise. I don’t want to simply contribute to that tone. As always, the answer is to work a bit harder, even at this medium that is supposedly recreation for me.
Tags: Blog Birthday, blogging, blogiversary, lj, self examination, writing