Blogging

I am once again joining in with #JusJoJan. Yesterday I did write, of course, but I didn’t link up, since my post wasn’t for the prompt. Today’s prompt is to share about your blogging endeavors. Why did you start blogging? How did you come up with your theme? How has blogging affected your life? And so on.

I probably shared this on my older blogs a couple of times already, but I don’t think I jotted about my blogging on here. I was probably destined to be a blogger, as even as a young teen in the late 1990s, I longed for someone to read what I’d written. Not my parents, of course, but I was pretty open about my writing otherwise. My father at one point joked that I showed my new best friend my diary the first time she visited me. I didn’t, but I did show her some personal writings of mine. Those got her to feel pity for me. The friendship wasn’t healthy to begin with, as I was needy and clingy. The friendship ended not even half a year later. Today, I won’t go into that. It only serves to prove that I was very open in my writing from an early age on.

I got a computer with Internet access in May of 2002, when I was fifteen. Within six months of that, I’d started an online diary. The contents of that diary, unlike those of many of my later attempts at keeping a blog, are still available online. Their original location, on DiaryLand, might even still exist.

In February of 2007, I created my WordPress account and moved the contents of my diary to my first legitimate blog. This diary had over the years started to contain some more essay-like posts besides the diary-style navel-gazing. However, with DiaryLand, there was no way of organizing your posts by categories or tags. My parents criticized me for being too personal in my diary. I didn’t intend on becoming less so, but now I could put all my navel-gazing into a category called “Personal” for people to skip.

I have had three blogs (if I include this one) that were lasting. First, I had said blog moved from DiaryLand. Then I had Blogging Astrid, which I originally intended to keep alongside this blog. That didn’t work.

A Multitude of Musings, the blog you are now reading, is, in fact, a restart of another relatively long-lasting blog I wrote in 2011. I am a bit sad that I deleted its content years ago, but I can’t undo that. Still, my stats say the day I had the most views was in 2011.

Blogging has had a huge impact on my life. My husband checked out my blog – the one that had been moved from DiaryLand – before he asked to meet me in real life. This meant he already knew me pretty well before we’d first met. In this sense, my marriage makes up for the friendship I wrote about above, as my husband chooses to stick by me despite my openness. I don’t encourage him to read my blog now, but if he wants to, he can. He’s occasionally been cross with me for sharing something about him. I try only to share the positive now.

Why did you decide to start blogging? How has blogging impacted your life?