Three Blogs

I've started a couple of blogs. This is the third. The first two are dead, and it's worth talking about why they died, because the reason is actually the whole point of this post.

At seventeen I wrote poetry. I'd like to tell you it was a vocation and I was on my way to become a Shakespeare or Wordworth. The poetry was aimed at a girl. She was in my class or perhaps we were in the same class, and I had worked out, with my genius teenager mind, that I was not going to make her like me by being myself, so I'd do it by becoming a wordsmith. The poems were not good. She was, as far as I'm aware of, never moved. The blog eventually died.

At twenty-two I started again, and this time it was serious. I'd become a pentecostal evangelical by then, and the blog was my mission field. I wrote to tell people about my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Every post was a net thrown gently to convert others. I was a fisher of men and I believed all of it. That's what makes this second blog unreadable to me now.

It took me years to see what they had in common, because on the surface they share nothing. A lovesick boy and a Jesus-crazy young man who thinks he's saving others don't look like the same person. But they were doing the same thing. Both were writing at someone. The words were a tool, and the writing was always directed somewhere else.

That's why both blogs died, and it was the same death both times. A tool is only worth keeping while it works. For the blogs, when she wasn't impressed, the poems had nowhere to go. The sermons went the same way once I stopped being sure I was meant to convert anyone.

Both of these blogs were a long time ago. Now, I have more failure behind me than I did then and fewer answers, which I used to think was the wrong direction for a person to be travelling.

Come to think of it, the two blogs failed when I had strong convictions and something to prove. This one I'm starting with weaker convictions and nothing to prove. I just want to be honest to myself.

I'd love to end there. It's a clean line and it makes me look like I've arrived. But the seventeen-year-old is still in here. Part of why I'm telling you all this so tidily is that I'd like you to think I'm the sort of person who notices these things. The wanting-to-impress didn't die. It's become quieter, and learned to pass for honesty. I've decided that's fine. I'm not going to wait until I'm free of it, because I'd be waiting forever. I'll write with this reality sitting in plain view where I can keep an eye on it. There's still a Poetry tab on this site. Consider it the ghost of the boy, minus the girl.

So this isn't a blog about any one thing. It's where the things I think about will go. You know, the ones that never quite fit into an evening chat with a close friend, that need more room than a conversation gives them before someone changes the subject. I need somewhere to set them down. That's what this blog is.

The only thing I'll add is the thing I actually learned: how much of a life goes by aimed at others. Writing to impress. Talking people to come to your point of view. Working, mostly, to be picked. All of it pointed at some result in someone else, almost none of it done for its own sake. I did all of it. Now I'd like to try writing to no one in particular, and see what's underneath when there's nothing I'm trying to get.

I don't know what to expect. That's why I'm finally writing in public again.