Well, I'm glad you asked! Let me share a bit more about myself first.
Writing has always been something I'm comfortable with, even in times when I choke up on my words and literally cannot say what I want out loud. It felt like a safe space.
When I was a little girl, I was the shyest being I had ever come across. I could not have many interactions without crying and was immensely dependent on my parents up until 13/14 years old. I also have always had a small frame, I seemed very fragile and that had its effects on me.
Basically, I started to get in a loop of "I shouldn't be crying in this situation", "well, I can't really help it", and "crying sucks, why am I so fragile"?
So yeah, expressing myself through speech was never really my thing growing up.
On the other hand, I quickly learned that writing was something that didn't make me insecure. I could thoroughly understand my feelings and make sense of them in my time, which was not always in one single conversation. Writing taught me that it's ok to elaborate on my feelings, think about them, put them on paper, and see if that makes sense for me. Crying was not even in the picture. So I started my first journal at ten.
I became very good at it, with practice. I began using it in therapy (I called it my shrink journal) and made my biggest breakthroughs this way. When I got my first internship position, alongside some engineers-to-be, I was told I was the Google Docs girl, the Microsoft Word girl, and I went with it. I was fine with it. In fact, I liked it.
The degree I chose to pursue in college also had a major impact on my writing, as it was very common for my evaluations to be 5-to-10-page long essays. By the end of it, I was writing 8-page exams by hand in two hours. And I was writing in multiple languages.
But when I talked about this blog idea with some people, I got mostly the same response:
But who reads blogs these days? You should start a dedicated Instagram or Tiktok page...
Well, I grew up reading blogs and was part of the first social media rise, so I'm sure that, like me, many other millennials and people who love to read are still around, even though we are not the majority. There is still space for us here.
My second response was following the childhood story I wrote about earlier. Even if I get more views, likes, shares, or whatever else on Instagram and Tiktok, I still wouldn't be comfortable sharing my thoughts and ideas, so why put myself through that now?
Starting a blog for me, in a way, is a redemption for my child self. I am able to better express and put myself out there, but now, in a more mature way. I understood that it's ok to have our limitations and work with them, not against them. I understood that my creative outlet does not have to rely on what is current, but rather on what works for me.
So why a blog, you ask? I hope the answer was clear enough.
See you in the post!
X.O.
IAS
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