Why write a blog?

What is the purpose of a blog, really? Many people begin one out of boredom, or to communicate with the online world, to prove that they exist, or to prove that they write, or to share what they write, but in the end, who reads them? They are really only read if the blogger develops a specialty in a certain field and becomes a self-proclaimed expert in that field, but what is the point, really? Yes, some people end up being able to earn some money through their blogs, or can add it to their online portfolio, so that they can get other "writing" jobs, and I suppose that there are some people that are very passionate about their subject matter, their so-called specialty, that they feel the need to "share" this information with the anonymous public of readers, who could very well be no one. When we write online, there is a strange feeling, because we do not know if we are writing to no one, or if we are in fact writing to everyone. We could potentially reach a public of an exponential size, but in the end, probably not even our biggest fans will read most of our work, nor our closest friends. They simply do not have the time. And with everyone blogging, how could they?

So again, I ask, what is the purpose of a blog, really? For me, it is to finally share some of my writing, with the intention to not offend people, or to create problems for me in my professional or personal life, but that could always happen, no matter what we write. It seems impossible to be entirely "professional" nowadays while also being simultaneously "authentic". If we choose to censor all of our writing, art, photographs, and internet behavior, in the end, all that will be left is a shell of a person, a skeleton to which people cannot relate, and which will arouse suspicion in the end. But if we share ourselves in an uncensored way, we might easily be criticized for being "unprofessional" or for offending someone because of something we write or express. There is also the concern about being "coherent" for on the internet, our multiple identities of our artist persona, teacher persona, poet persona, the personas of our past lives in distant towns and countries, the multiple professional personas which we have occupied in order to survive and earn a living in a capitalist world, and the different people that we have to pretend to be in order to have good social relations (the good daughter, the good friend, the good caretaker, the good role model) all crowd together simultaneously in the same space and we are asked the impossible: to unite them. They are not coherent, their diversity has a purpose of the different roles to play in different social contexts; the coherency lies in the person that we are, and how these multiple existences coexist within us.

Yet again, I wonder, what is the purpose of a blog, really? For this blog, it is to experiment with different ways of sharing my writing, with the intention to create a space where those who would like to follow my work, are welcome to do so. There is no pressure to follow me, and I can guarantee no expertise. I may very well be writing into a void, with no one to read me. Which is perfectly fine with me too. In my opinion, it isn't essential to be read, what is essential is to write, and put words into verbal form. Our writing might be lost, deleted, burnt, forgotten, or edited out in the future. What matters most is expressing it in the now, for the person who feels that urge, to work through his or her thoughts, and to make them known to the writer. Everything else is a mere supposition of how our words might be received and interpreted, which we can never know, nor ever be able to control, for we cannot know the thoughts of others, nor can we control how they view us or how they understand what we have wrote. We can only send our poems out into the void, as if they were messages in a bottle, with the thought that maybe, possibly, there might be someone who will find them.