Notes on the road to realizing self-centered lives

by KATRINA STUART SANTIAGO

Saturday, August 19, 2006
ENDINGS...

I have a confession to make: I used to have a blog. It is one that I have since become ashamed of, but can't quite figure out how to delete. The shame comes from the force that drove me to even start it: a broken heart. And since that has ceased to exist, there is a need to delete proof that it ever did.

	CONFESSIONS MADE PUBLIC. Blogs are giving anyone who has an Internet connection and the leisure to sit in front of a computer the tools to vent out frustration, release pent-up energy, and scream the unspoken.

But more than what brought the blog on, it's what it ultimately became that I find shameful: a sorry excuse for recovery and moving on, and in the process, proof of self-centeredness.

Few people know of that blog, and yet I fear that at some point I will be revealed as that forlorn girl all too willing to wear my heart on my sleeve for the entire (Internet) world to see. A girl who could only exist within her tiny little world of pain, in the midst of this sad suffering country.

Monday, August 21, 2006
...AND BEGINNINGS: WHY BLOG?

While I realized long ago that my blog was a poor excuse for productivity at a time when there was a dire lack of it, I have yet to lose my liking for reading other people's blogs — from those by friends to those of near-strangers. It's brought on by whatever you might think: voyeurism maybe? Curiosity, most probably. The possibility of finding gold on a bad, bad day, usually. Gold is found when I am made to realize that I can't be worse off than that near-stranger who reveals that her issue of the week has been how to fix her unmanageable hair.

Self-gratification, I find, is the name of the game as far as blogs in this country are concerned. Writing is a very personal thing. And using it to alleviate anxiety and anger, to celebrate happiness and excitement, is as old as the act itself of sitting down and gathering one's thoughts.

There was a time of course when we wrote about our lives in diaries and journals, keeping them hidden from the rest of the world, and keeping the unsaid just that: not worthy of articulation, or just too sensitive an issue to be articulated. In writing a diary under lock and key, it is the release of emotion that is the point; and it becomes the only goal. That many will say writing has allowed them to survive, or that articulation was all they needed to move on and recover from an event in their lives, has become cliché.

Now imagine this: to the act of journal writing, add a blank unspeaking computer screen, an invisible audience, and the freedom to be anonymous. What have you got? Confessions made public. The Internet, through the weblog or blog, has allowed for this to happen, giving anyone who has an Internet connection and the leisure to sit in front of a computer the tools to vent out frustration, release pent-up energy, and scream the unspoken. The World Wide Web, after all, is about the right to our freedoms: of information, of speech, of expression. And the blog is but one Internet genre that allows its users to exercise — and have access to — these rights.

That is ultimately what makes blogging a most liberating thing.