When I was 21, I sustained a voice injury that altered my blogging.

In Jen Lee‘s Finding Your Voice. Jen defines a voice injury as:

… a loss in your freedom, your confidence, or in what you feel is fair game to say and share.

At 21, I was identifying as a Christian, and struggling horribly with maintaining that identity. I was dating the man who would become my husband. I blogged fairly candidly in those days about my struggles with my faith, my identity within the Church, and my struggles with sex (aka my boyfriend and I were doing it, and I felt G-U-I-L-T-Y). In those days, I was spending a great deal of energy trying to please the other Christians in my life while still trying to maintain some sort of candid honesty about my shortcomings and struggles so others knew they weren’t alone.

Somewhere along the way, I thought it was a good idea to share my blog URL with the church leadership.

It wasn’t.

I don’t really recall what the straw that broke the camel’s back was… but one afternoon I found myself staring down the barrel of a critical email from the pastor of my church. He’d had enough, and decided to call me out on my shit.

I remember he had cited a post where I’d talked about not believing in God that I’d written well before my conversion and accused me of writings not becoming of a young Christian woman. He accused me of being mentally ill and in need of therapy. He told me that I needed to delete my blog.

My internal reaction was along the lines of “Fuck you, asshole” but outwardly I chose to react passively. I didn’t respond to the email. I shared it with my boyfriend and he agreed that the pastor had crossed a line, and we never went back to church. One of the other church elders called me a few weeks later to ask whether or not I wanted help to find a therapist and have the church pay for it. I politely said I’d think about it and promptly never did. I wrote Christianity off as a failed experiment.

And… I internalized the message that something was severely wrong with me for posting my thoughts online. I’m constantly paralyzed by fear when I try to write because I’m irrationally afraid that I’m going to offend someone for just being honest about where I’m at.

I try to look back on it with a degree of maturity and understanding. I don’t believe my pastor was trying to be a malicious jerk. I believe he was genuinely concerned, the words he chose expressed himself poorly and caused me to assign a tone to them that he probably didn’t intend, and we probably had a difference of opinion on what was acceptable information for public consumption.

It’s been seven years and I’m still trying to let it go. I’ve forgiven him for it, but I’m still trying to undo the damage that was done to my ability to not be ashamed of my story and where I’m at.

It seems like every time I sit down to write a post recently, the only thing I can think of to write about is blogging and then I get irritated with myself because I don’t really want to write about blogging because I feel like I’m going through one of those phases where the phrase “you’re over thinking it” rings true.

But fuck it. If that’s the only thing that’s going to break this horrible writer’s block that’s somehow set into my brain, I guess I’ll do that.

There was a thread the other day on 20sb.net soliciting opinions on whether or not individuals thought that they’d be blogging forever or if it was just a passing fad in their life, and it’s been interesting to read through what other people have said…. It’s been interesting to read why other people blog, what their motivations for doing so are… and it got me to thinking a bit about my own history with blogging, my own motivations, and if I foresee myself doing this indefinitely into the future.

I started blogging in November 1997. Actually, it’s inaccurate to say I was blogging. If you go digging about the history of blogging, the term weblog wasn’t coined until December 1997, and it wasn’t shortened to blog until April or May of 1999 when some guy decided to title his list of links “we blog” and the term spread like wildfire when Pyra Labs with public with it’s service Blogger in August 1999. Before that, they were called online journals or online diaries… but in general, served the same purpose so I just say I’ve been blogging since 1997.

When I started I was a few months shy of my 14th birthday.

For those of you who are too lazy to do math, that means I’m in my 14th year of blogging. I’m twenty-eight years old. I’ve been a blogger for approximately half of my life at this point. Being a blogger is something that’s sort of ingrained in the fabric of my being. I grew up doing this. I don’t forsee a future without doing this. I’d say it’s a part of who I am.

At the core, I’m a personal blogger. My blog is about my life, pure and simple. I’ve never been a topical blogger, per se. Historically, I’ve tended to write about what’s going on with me, thoughts on various issues that seem to be coming up in my everyday life, so on and so forth. I’ve never been able to commit to a specific topic, nor do I want to.

At times, that’s a challenge. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown a lot more private and selective about what I tell. I think sometimes that’s a good thing, and sometimes it’s just me being cowardly and lazy. It’s also frustrating when you’re going through a period of time in your life where you wish you could sit down and write a blog entry about it, but you can’t exactly bring yourself to do that. I suppose that’s why paper journals and changing visibility to private exist (and I do these things) but when you want to be making a concerted effort to be writing publicly and the main topic of your blog is your life, it’s… well… frustrating.

Which I suppose is where I’m at right now. Frustrated about wanting to blog about the unbloggable.

Not that all of it’s unbloggable either, it’s just… well… I’m self-conscious about things to the point of fault at times. I’m not sure why I care what complete strangers think about the way I live my life, but I’m horribly afraid of being judged poorly… so I tend to err toward writing more conservatively than I actually live to make y’all think I’m perfect or something.

Which I’m not.

I just like to pretend I am.

(In the nature of disclosure, I have written half of this entry under the influence of bourbon.)

One of the things that came up in that 20sb thread by some folks is that they figured they’d only continue blogging if they managed to build themselves a reasonably loyal following, were getting a decent amount of comments on every post and getting a reasonable amount of hits.

That’s totally not me.

Okay, sure… those are things I’m aware of. I get super duper excited when I get a comment on one of my posts (and double kudos if you’re conversational about it). I check my Google Analytics account pretty much daily to see what my hit count was for the day before and the bigger the number the happier I am, but I don’t care so much that I’m going to stop writing if the numbers for those things are zero…. and from my experience, the more I write the more those numbers are not zero.

But at the end of the day, I still do write for me.

So, I care. But I don’t care.

Or something like that.

If you’re a blogger, do you envision yourself doing it forever? Why do you blog? If you don’t, why don’t you?

First, let’s establish the timeline of things. I was born in 1984. I’m currently twenty-seven years old. I created my first website in 1996. I was twelve years old. I did my science fair project on HTML and Web Design in the seventh grade, the year was 1997. I started writing journal entries on my website during November 1997, I was in the eighth grade and thirteen years old. The term blog was popularized in 1999, when I was 15. I bought my first domain in 2002. I consolidated all of my journal entries into that blog. I posted there until sometime in 2005 or 2006… and then, I got told by the pastor of the church I was at that I was a nutjob for posting about all the things I did online and that I should delete posts… and well… it’s all be down hill from there. I’ve started and restarted blogs at new locations, new services, and nothing’s really stuck. I post for awhile and then I fall silent and have the urge to reset everything back to zero.

I used to hate those people. The people that every so often they’d get frazzled with the status quo and delete their website and just start over fresh. Hell, I think I still do. I think there’s a little bit of self-loathing going on right now that I’ve wiped the slate clean for myself again. Also the guilt that I decided to use WordPress for my blog instead of Drupal… Not that it really should make any difference to anyone, but I just couldn’t blog using Drupal because every time I logged into my own site, I just started thinking about work…. but I digress.

I have been making websites for fifteen years. I have been journaling / blogging online in some form or another for fourteen years. I got into the business of making websites not to make websites, but to write…. and over time, the writing fell by the wayside. Writing is something I want to reclaim in my life. Telling my life’s story is something that’s important to me. Of course, now I’m older and wiser, so the editorial choices are a little harder. When I was younger, I wrote with no concern to who might be reading.

Today, I begin again.