Monday, October 15, 2007

The road to get here ... anxieties of a new blogger


Believe me when I say that writing this first post did not come as easy as I thought it would be.

What am i gonna write about? Which story am I gonna tell first?

Have you experienced meeting up with a long-time friend, someone you haven't seen for maybe more than a decade now? I mean, someone who has been dear and close to you who probably knows some of your secrets and has probably heard those stories you wouldn’t dare tell others who are not that close to you.

Jittery!
I guess so, too!
Cold sweat on your palms!
You bet!

That’s exactly how I felt when I sat down to write this entry for my blog.

It sure feels like those few minutes before actually meeting up, when all the stories you have stored in your memory and kept inside your heart suddenly come to the surface and flood your entire being.

The decision to start blogging came even before I realized it. This happened a month ago while I was browsing through these 'small notebooks' (a.k.a personal journals) that is now starting to fill up a large portion of the bookshelf standing right beside me now.

Come to think of it, I haven’t touched any of my journals for the past 10 years. Although writing in these personally-selected notebooks has become a daily ritual, it’s just that ... as soon as I finish writing on the last page, got this habit to simply keep them together with the rest of the growing stack of journals, sitting there patiently, probably waiting for the time when I would be visiting them once again. I often make that promise to myself whenever I start writing in a new notebook -- that one of these days I'm going back to read them all over again.

Years passed, and soon I completely forgot to remember that I haven’t fulfilled that promise at all.

That afternoon, reading the first few chapters of the book Leaving a Trace by Alexandra Johnson made me jump from my seat to go and pick up one of my well-kept “small notebooks” and started reading from a page that actually opened up by itself. Soon, the floor piled with all the other notebooks and I was scanning briskly one notebook after another.

This book, by the way, is about keeping a journal. It talks about the art of transforming a life into stories. It offers ways to find the story underneath the surface of what has been written in one’s journal.


I waded through layers and layers of thoughts and memories, each claiming to be prioritized as THE story I should use as ‘starter’ in our conversation … but I continued wading some more to give me enough space for the ‘preliminaries’, as I often call it, to say “HI” and “Hey, how are you now?” … and maybe, an intentional silence after that … the way we often do when we finally find ourselves in front of someone distantly familiar, but familiar nonetheless.

While in the middle of being thrown 'back in time', I suddenly realized that while previous entries (meaning, entries written 8 - 12 years ago) were written primarily for my own future reading purposes, entries for the succeeding years (2000 - current year) revealed a subtle shift … a different voice, different voices actually, have started to assert themselves! There was also a change in the tone and the way things were written.

At first I couldn’t recognize what the difference was. After a few more days of re-viewing more stories of what happened way back then … I finally found the ‘difference’ I was looking for!!! I discovered that for the past 5 years, I was starting to write for an-other audience!

I guess that signaled that journal writing has slowly ceased to be purely a private matter for me. I even removed these notebooks from their boxes where I used to keep them, and placed them alongside with all the books on display in these shelves.

For some of you who may have experienced writing in personal journals and have now become experienced bloggers, you could probably imagine what that ‘shift’ means. I was telling myself that I got an inkling about it, I guess … but every time I try to catch it, to describe it … words continue to slip out of my fingers. Such definition remains elusive. Maybe, it’s not meant to be defined after all. It’s just that. The way stories are told and shared with others … in search of that resonance and affirmation that we are not alone with what we experience in our day-to-day lives.

Now that my 2 daughters are both teens, we also enjoy exchanging stories: they, with their recent 'episodes' with their friends, and me, with my own stories as well ... and some stories culled from my journal entries, too.

And aside from dear friends who continue to encourage me as some of them have already started their own blogs, reading stories shared by other bloggers touched me so deeply so much so that all my apprehensions and hesitance to share mine slowly dissolved to oblivion.

And so here I am, introducing to you this world of Meandering Thoughts,** with a vague notion of what this Blog is going to be all about.

Hope you'll visit often and join me meander a bit more...


** Meandering Thoughts is the original title of this Blog.

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