Blogs (and the silent soapbox).

I much like the idea of blogs.

It harkens way back to the early internet - everyone had a blog, or a dumb website for their cat. It was a time of casting lines into the deep without hoping for a fish. Travel blogs, foodie sites, and personal ramblings were as common as hookers without teeth. 

It was a time when people said anything and everything they wanted on the internet. 

It's clear that the internet has changed since then. 

I remember when I first found my parent's old blog. Circa-the-few-months-before-I-was-born, they both wrote about how excited they were for me. How my brother was taking the news. How I could be born the day of my brother's Kindergarten graduation - he wasn't happy about that (good thing I was born the day before!). It's a time capsule, a very limited snapshot into a time when I wasn't around but my presence was felt. It didn't show my biological father's drinking or deteriorating mind, or my mother's broken emotional intelligence. It was baby photos and stresses about the broken dishwasher. 

They, of course, called me their son. Before I was born, yes, but my mother still has a tendency to do so. I stopped being my parents' son when I was in 6th grade, but I stopped being a boy before then. Something to speak on beyond this post, I believe.

Back to blogs. I remember a conversation with my 11th-grade English teacher, a heavyset second-generation Scottish immigrant who had a way with words that I envy, in which he urged me to start a blog. I think he, more than anything, wanted me to share my writing with the world. I find the idea of sharing what I write ultimately intimidating. Not for fear of backlash or critique (I care little about what other people have to say about my writing), but for the fear of being seen. At all. Like an internet scopohobia. I hate the idea of having a presence on the internet - you'll never see my real name here, or anywhere else sharing my username. If it were up to me, my name and face would be nonexistent to the public eye online.

But, as the Scotsman urged, baby steps. My writing is too me to not let other people see it, he said. I always had a fear of sharing my work in person, as well. I know it's good, but it's not for other people. It's for me.

There's a joy in writing for oneself, but it's a silent soapbox. It's a voice that gets caught on one's tongue and doesn't escape the mouth. It's an inner thought. 

It's nothing to write home about.

Even if I whisper sweet nothings into the lake, I still cast a line. It's not communion, but it no longer becomes a silent soapbox. 

Just a really, really quiet one.

Baby steps.