Why Wednesday? Blogging...

If you have children or have ever really been around a child, you know that phase where they continuously and relentlessly ask questions.  And usually no matter how far from that original question you get, it always ends up devolving into that 3-letter word that can keep the game going indefinitely:  Why?

That game tortured me when Chas was little, but I have to say that it also made me think about a lot of things that I’d never really thought about before or at least not to that extent.  Why are chicken nuggets this shape?  Why is it important to wash your hair?  Why do we call it a pair of pants when it’s a single item?

With that in mind, I’ve decided to start a series of sorts.  I want to explore some of the mundane and the profound in life in Why Wednesday?  Some topics may be silly and some may delve a bit deeper, but all are made so that I can tackle some of my beliefs and find out Why?  Why do I believe that?  Why do I watch that?  Why don’t I do that?

Today, I wanted to start off with something a bit on the lighter side and try to explain: 

Why I Blog?

I’ve always enjoyed writing.  It has been therapeutic for me.  I think it must somehow run in my genes, because I can remember as a child watching my sister work consistently on poems and screenplays and stories in the bedroom we shared.  She even went to school for it.  Most of my early writing was fiction and I even collaborated with a friend where we’d pass off a notebook and write a long story involving the teachers and classmates we encountered.  I still have a lot of those files that I would transcribe on my computer.  However, they are on discs that no longer work on modern computers (I’m old, y’all).

Writing stories, like reading stories, gave a way to escape and enter a completely made up world.  When I wrote the stories, I got to create that world. 

Today, I still write a fiction story or work on an old one every once in a while.  And I vow to one day participate in NaNoWriMo.  However, I’ve realized that as I have gotten older, I have a lot more to say about the world I currently live in than the fictional ones I created.  I have thoughts and opinions and ideas.  I took to social media for a while and that was fine, but I realized that that wasn’t the best medium to say all that I wanted to say.  And it certainly wasn’t great for long detailed posts or delicate opinions.

I had just a couple of friends that wrote blogs and I read a couple that I really enjoyed.  I wanted to enter that arena.  I wanted to put my words out there, too.  I wanted to be able to bear my heart and say the things that were on my mind and relevant to the world I lived in.

Ultimately I blog because it helps me.  It gets me out of my head a bit and allows me to say the things that are often bottled up in me with no way out.  I blog because I enjoy it.  Someday it would be great if I had a large readership and it’d be even greater if I could make money at this, but really I blog first for myself.  And I hope that maybe someday something I write might help someone else.  As one of my (few) blogging friends once told me, “Blogging is good for the soul.”