I had a conversation with a friend today during my break between classes. She was talking about her weekend and how she’d spent a couple hundred on dinner for her and one other person (because authentic Japanese food apparently costs a bundle) and she was going on about how since school had started in September, she didn’t have a lot of time for her hobbies. And then she asked me what my hobbies are.

Crocheting, making jewellery, knitting, writing, dolls. My usual answers nowadays. Despite the fact that I haven’t knit anything in a while, or been crocheting much, and the last time I made any piece of jewellery was three weeks ago (a necklace). And my dolls… Well, they’ve been getting a bit neglected these days. And then there’s writing.

“Oh? What kind of writing do you do?”

Poetry. Short stories. Novels. Blogging. I expected her to ask about the novels. Then I could break into my usual speech about NaNoWriMo and how awesome it is. Write-ins, online community, thousands of equally insane people doing the same crazy task as you (and some surpass your insanity because they get 200k words done in one month, as opposed to 50k).

Instead, she asked me this “Why do you blog?”

It took me a moment to come up with an answer.

I like having a record of things. I like writing, it’s quite therapeutic, in its own way. I like sharing (generally) and getting feedback on things. When I’m having a bad day, I write about it to just reflect on what has happened. When I’m having a good day, there’s a lot of exclamation! points! and I like getting feedback on my day’s happenings as well. I found it incredibly difficult to explain as to why I like blogging. Maybe I like the community aspect of it, being able to visit other people’s blogs and comment and then some people will return comments and tell me what they thought of my day.

“Does your boyfriend read it? Isn’t that awkward?”

Yeah, I suppose it is at times. I mean, I think I was a lot more… free about what I wrote about before I told him about IS.com. I swore a lot more (haha), and I mentioned more of our fights, I think. Lately there’s a lot of things that have been going on between Clay and myself that I just haven’t been blogging about. While blogging is great and it’s still quite therapeutic, I find that there’s a lot of things that just don’t need to be shared with the internet as a whole. I still talk about happy moments, the occasional fight (when it deems remotely necessary to be mentioned) but at the same time… I’ve made a lot of my old posts private. I have gone through a lot of the posts and made them inaccessible to people who aren’t registered.

Of course, I didn’t explain it like that.

“Yeah, Clay knows about it. He reads it sometimes, I think. Pfft, it’s not that awkward.”

“And how about me? Do you write about me on your blog?”

I paused at that question and gave a small smile.

“I don’t think so. Now study.”

My question to you, if you blog, why do you do it?