Why Do I Blog?

I have been asking myself this question a lot, lately.  I don't know why it's so important, but I feel this need to define my desire to blog.  I mean, I could never, in a bajillion years, keep a diary or a journal.  I know.  I've tried.  I could probably fill a garbage bag with diaries and journals that I started, and then tossed aside after a whopping three days.  Somehow, my life was never interesting enough to write down, when it was just me reading it.

Of course, to be fair, many of those journal entries looked something like this:

Dear Diary,
It's been a long day! First I got up, ten minutes before my alarm went off!  Then, I went to school.  Nothing really happened.  Then, I came home and had a snack.  Then, I watched TV - All That is the coolest show ever!  Then, I finished my book.  Now, it's time for bed!
Goodnight, Diary,
Love,
Tabitha

Seriously.  I've come across diaries I wrote at age 7 and at age 14, and everything in between, and they're all like that.

Then, I got to college, and decided that I would really like to leave a record of my life - you know, in case anybody 100 years from now cares about how people live now.  For the first time, I managed to make it past day 3.  In fact, I filled stacks of notebooks.  Unfortunately, I filled them all with bad poetry, as young college students are wont to do.  And even that only lasted about a year, before I realized that my poetry really was pretty terrible.  Rather than embarrass myself any further for future generations, I decided to stop while I was ahead (or behind, but whatever).

At that point, I pretty much gave up on the idea of creating a chronicle of my life.  After all, I never did anything particularly interesting, and who was ever going to care.

And then Miles was born.  Suddenly, I have a million little things that I never want to forget.  I thought about trying the old Journal route again, but given my complete failure at keeping anything like that going, I started a blog.  That way, I figured, I could also share the adorable antics of my son with friends and family without telling them all the same story a gobozillion* times.  And they would hold me accountable for writing.  When I don't write for a few days, trust me, I hear about it. :)

But even that isn't the full reason why I blog.  If it was, you wouldn't get so many of these annoyingly introspective posts.  What I've come to realize is that I blog because writing is a release, for me.  When I've had a bad day, I pour it all out onto the keyboard, and my mind calms a bit.  And when I've had an amazingly wonderful day, I pour it all into the keyboard to try and hold on to the fleeting happy moments.

People 100 years from now probably won't care about this blog, or any number of others out there that are just like it.  But in 50 years, I will care.  I will be able to look back at my life, replete with its successes and failures, and know that overall, I was happy.

* As in, gobs of zillions.