Ten reasons I’m choosing to blog in the year 2025
I want to. And no part of that “want to” includes monetization, so who cares that blogging is dead, anyway.
I want a place for my ideas to live, like a little terrarium for my thoughts. Someplace that ideas and wonderings can exist within a structure. A home other than my journal or a Google Doc or my embarrassingly-expensive smart typewriter. I want a reason to polish instead of abandon, to push a paragraph a little further. I want to practice shaping my words — which always feels to me like additive sculpture — instead of abandoning the raw materials, strewn across my work desk.
As much as I love Instagram, I am sick of the algorithm and the lure of shopping ads. As much as I adore (and equally resent) TikTok, I dislike taking videos of myself and ad-libbing to my phone. Which is to say that I have always been a written-words kinda girl.
I really like my life and I take pretty pictures of things in my life and I like sharing those photos.
I’ve struggled to feel like a writer since I finished my MFA in 2022 and chose to sacrifice a dream job in publishing for a sensible, more lucrative job at a software company. I always return to writing, but it is often with fear, with shame, with disappointment. I am determined to practice feeling like a writer, and spending time with words helps me do that (even when the words aren’t publishable or marketable).
I’m a sucker for a theme, a structure to work within, a constraint to strain against. A weekly list of some sort, a Saturday-roundup-but-better: these give me goosebumps.
I love how real my writing feels when I control typefaces and branding and images, when my words are displayed in something other than Times New Roman.
(AND clicking “publish” on a personal blog post feels so ultimately humbling, so silly, so self-indulgent — AND I’m putting myself through The Artist’s Way again, so it feels important to practice accepting that things feeling embarrassing doesn’t mean they’re stupid or wrong or shitty).
I’ve spent the last fifteen or so years of my life bemoaning the fact that I was too young and too christian-homeschooled-sheltered to participate in the heyday of blogging. (I’m a millennial, but just barely. Born one year after the concept of blogging came into existence, a few years before the term “blog” was coined or platforms like blogger launched.) As an older teenager, I kept a blog or two that my few friends and my parents and some church acquaintances read, which is to say that I pushed no limits and had very little fun experimenting.
The fact that I missed blogging’s heyday is unfair, but ultimately not my business. It’s not my fault I’m late to the party.