I created my first blog in order to share my experiences in Northern Uganda as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It had four purposes
- reflect on my experiences
- document them
- share them with my friends and family back in the state
- share them with a broader public audience who might be interested
I’d wanted a blog for a while. I liked something about the idea of writing and publishing what I was seeing and thinking and who I was making in a longer form than Instagram posts. It felt more nuanced and personal in a way that was more comfortable to me - I remember talking in depth with my brother about how I realized, now that it was a major link back to my friends and family in in the US, about how uncomfortable it was for me to use social media.
Looking back, I think that creating any public representation of oneself on the internet is difficult and vulnerable. But I’ve learned that, to the extent it is a tool of expression to people I talk to outside of social media at some point, it can also be a very helpful tool of expression. And expression is a helpful aide to curiosity, “social adventure” if that’s a thing, and experiential sharing, which can be incredibly valuable.
Searching for the Perfect Blog
My first blog was written in Wordpress. I really loved dropping photos and videos into posts for extra context. I would include photos of me with my fellow teachers, of details that stood out to me like architecture or biology in Uganda, and videos I cut together of what my local town Lira was like.
The biggest issue was friction to making posts. Wordpress was slow. I needed an internet connection to publish. I felt that without these barriers, I might create more blog posts. I think that, this was sort of true, but it also sort of wasn’t. Partly, since my audience was varied and I knew this might be the best glimpse into my life they’d get since I was talking less and less frequently with friends, I felt a lot of pressure for the posts to be honest, meaningful and engaging to a wide audience, which is just hard.
Conclusion
I believe that collocating notes with published thoughts does a lot of amazing things at once.
I think that notes benefit from being published because
- Other people can improve them
- Other people can benefit from them
- It can start conversations
- It holds the writer accountable to a certain standard, which can often be nourishing to ideas
By keeping the membrane between notes and published thoughts thin and easily permeated, it allows our notes to get all these benefits, but it also means that unpublished content can be kept right at the edge of the public eye until the writer thinks that’s okay. And if the writer decides that the thought isn’t ready for the world, or that the world isn’t prepared for the idea, then it’s easy to walk back into a personal note.