For the generations who’ve grown up with the internet, blogs are old news. Every hip business has a blog; influencers have blogs (or they used to, before they turned to Twitter, Instagram, and vlogs); every activity or interest has a core of people who blog about it. In fact, I started encountering blogs accidentally a few years ago, for online recipes. I wanted to know, for example, how to make really great macs and cheese from scratch. When I typed that request into Google, most of what came up was recipes in cooking blogs. Though grateful for the recipe, I ignored the rest of the post. (Btw, I did find a fabulous recipe for macs and cheese. I still use it when I have a desperate yearning for comfort food.)
Then I retired, and a few months later, we settled for six weeks in Florence. When we needed to find out how to handle trash in Italy, lo and behold, some nice couple had posted how to place the right trash in the right receptacle, along with helpful photos. When a friend recommended Georgette Jupes’ “Girl in Florence” blog, I started reading it for upbeat takes on ex-pat life (as well as for restaurant recommendations). A few friends talked to me about the blogs they consulted regularly – on cooking, knitting, travel, or even winnowing out closets. So while we were in Florence, I crafted a few posts about our adventure for our friends. I signed up with Bluehost and WordPress, then learned (from a blog post) how to edit a post, how to upload photos, and how to publish the result. I had a good time with it.
Once we returned home to ordinary retired life, it occurred to me to ask, Are there blogs about retirement? Well, yes, as it turns out, there are. Many of them. There are financial consultants who give advice (lots of sites like that), some fairly political blogs on aging, and some ordinary people who bravely share their experiences in retiring. I enjoyed both the easy tone of the retirees’ posts and the comments from their lively online communities.
But that was reading blogs. Why should I write one? I didn’t have an unusual background, angle on the world, or skill-set to offer. I didn’t need to make money or have any desire to become an influencer. On the other hand, our experiences in Florence had been a pleasure to put down in writing and pair with our photos. And since I was already combing my way through books about retirement, why not share my research? Also, it emerged that composing a blog post felt quite a bit like composing an opening mini-lecture for a class. It made me ponder not just what to say but also how to say it.
So then, why not blog? It was a very low-risk adventure. Few people would read it, and those few were friends. Even if they hated what I wrote, they wouldn’t hate me. Maybe they’d even write me back! (They do, mostly via email. I love hearing people’s thoughts in response.) It was cheap, too, especially compared to many things people take up post-retirement. Signing up for Bluehost and WordPress runs about eight dollars a year. How-to hints abound all over the internet.
Underlying those reasons for blogging is something more pressing: As I moved into retirement, I wanted to start reckoning with my life – both the long arc and the day-to-day. And I wanted to do that out loud.
Blogging forces me into a kind of public accountability for my life and thought. Here I can consider an issue from several angles and come to a preliminary stance on it. I can ask myself, Is what I’m writing here what I really believe to be true? Even if it’s only Step One in the process of thinking an issue out, it should be the truest truth I can articulate at that moment.
But the deepest reason for me to blog arises from my long-time struggle with perfectionism. For most of my life, the threat of criticism has quashed my confidence and suffocated my writing. I’ve started writing several books and never finished them because I got bored and frustrated with them. I wrote so laboriously that I began to loathe how stupid – or shallow, or dull, or simplistic – they seemed. Sometimes those judgments may have been too harsh, but sometimes the ideas actually were dull and simplistic: my self-censorship went so deep that my more daring or interesting thoughts never even surfaced to consciousness.
For twenty years now, I’ve been trying to get my tyrannical superego to chill the f*** out. (As Annie Lamott says in Bird by Bird, “Quieting these [critical] voices is at least half the battle I fight daily. But this is better than it used to be. It used to be 87 percent.”) Like her, I’ve made slow but genuine progress over the years. Blogging – in other words, publishing something small and transitory on a regular basis – is the next natural step. Thanks for keeping me company on the journey!
I love the notion of a blog as reaching for “public accountability for one’s life and thought” and being an attempt to articulate “the truest truth.” A blog, perhaps, is a kind of diary, but instead of being explicitly private it aims for connection, for an audience. I’m finding as I read these wonderful posts that the writing has an integrity that perhaps come from your knowing that they are out there for all to read. This unguardedness gives a reader something strong to connect to. At least it feels that way to me. With each new post I learn new things about, or have a new way of knowing, someone I thought I already knew pretty well! Thank you for this gift.
Hi Nancy! I love this post because I think every blogger I know goes through some of those similar thoughts. I completely agree with you when you say, “Blogging forces me into a kind of public accountability for my life and thought. Here I can consider an issue from several angles and come to a preliminary stance on it. I can ask myself, Is what I’m writing here what I really believe to be true? Even if it’s only Step One in the process of thinking an issue out, it should be the truest truth I can articulate at that moment.” I’m fairly fortunate that I don’t suffer too much from perfectionism…you’ve been reading my blog long enough to know that! But the opportunity to put my thoughts into words and then throw them out like seeds to anyone who might find them helpful keeps me going year after year. And I would be MORE than happy to share some of my ideas about self-publishing when you are ready. Again, sharing your truest truth with the world is reward enough. ~Kathy
Nancy, I so admire your courage in pursuing this venture as I truly understand the roar and power of that f***ing tyrannical superego voice, which I think of as that overly critical 8th grade teacher hovering over my shoulder ready to pounce with her red pen (it’s always her and it’s always a red pen—which is why I never in 45 years of teaching ever made use of red ink) and the need to knock her for a loop in order to write. I really cannot recall whether I am indebted to Annie Lamott for that image or whether it is my own personal incarnation of Lamott’s frequent references to the bogeymen that block writers, but I often conjured her in great detail for students as Mrs. Hennessey from Tennessee as a precursor to a freewriting exercise, encouraging them to invoke an image of their own, punch ‘em in the gut, and just write. Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” was assigned reading for the first year students I taught at Smith, and I kept copies of it in my desk drawer and handed it out liberally when chatting with students in the writing center struggling with an assignment.
But my point is Bravo! I can think of no better rationale for blogging than the one you articulate so eloquently: the desire at this stage in your life “to start reckoning” (a rich, well-chosen word) with your life, “both the long arc and the day-to-day. And I wanted to do that out loud.” You are doing it with such grace and rigor, and I for one, am totally enjoying the ride each week.