Posting Pressure

This blogging thing is a pretty fascinating experience.  Surreal in many ways.

There is the fact that I (and many other bloggers) essentially use cyberspace, open and public, the way an 18th century American girl would have used a diary.

Then there is the fact that bloggers have the audacity to think that others are interested in reading our diaries when they aren't forbidden.  (Surely that was always one of the attractions of reading someone's diary, right?)

Add to that the pressure to produce something interesting to keep people coming back, and to expand who might be reading your diary.  (If you kept a secret diary, someone stole it to read once and then put it back, never caring to read it again, you'd likely presume that your life wasn't worth reading about, even the top secret parts.)

A college friend of mine writes a terrific blog, and I've told her so.  This week she posted that my compliments actually added pressure to her.  Now she felt like she had to come up with something great every time she posted.  I understand that, too.

I've had many ideas for blog posts but don't want to simply dash off a quick note.  I want each post to have something substantial, profound, existential, transformational, to it.  I think I've confused two things: interest and worth.

See, I often focus on the externals, and so piquing the interest of others -- especially, I admit, those I hold in high esteem -- is consistently high in my priority list.  It's why I incessantly make jokes, though half of them (or more) bomb miserably.  I am working very hard to have people perceive me as clever, as interesting.  I face the same thing with the blog: I must post often, and every post must be perceived as terrific.

But worth is more important.  It's so obvious, right?  Given a choice between a post that someone else finds interesting or amusing, or a post that actually means something (more on that in a moment), wouldn't we almost always choose worth over interest?  Sometimes, if we're honest, we'd rather have someone be interested in our blather than disinterested in our profundity.  That's relationship talking, and it is ironically, worth considering.  But by and large, we should be opting for importance over interest.

But how does a post "mean" something?  I suppose this gets back to the purpose of a blog.  If it's supposed to be a money maker or an attraction, then I'm a slave to being interesting.  Which means I may or may not be honest, or substantive, or beneficial, when those things don't make me interesting.

If, on the other hand, a blog is more of a diary -- a way of processing externally what is happening to me internally -- then the worth is the honesty, the personal substance, the beneficence to the reader.  The worth is intrinsic, because it's about the person doing the blogging and not the grammar, syntax, or clever turn of phrase or storytelling of the blog.  That's the kind of blog I'm hoping to write here.

(Of course, then you have the fact that if I write this blog to let people see what's going on inside me, and no one is reading it ...)