I have just read the first blog entry I ever posted: RIP Stan Mitchell. 2nd May 1926 ~ 22nd December 2010. I now have a lump in my throat and I’m struggling to hold back tears. The tears aren’t because it was badly written, the tears are because my first ever blog entry was about my dad dying the previous day. That happened a year ago today, which is why I have just read that blog post for the first time since I published it. I don’t quite remember my thought process on the day I wrote that blog. I remember sitting at my laptop, drinking lots of tea and crying. I know my predominant thought was that I needed to sort out the mass of emotions I was feeling, maybe even confess the guilt, and I knew that I would never be able to vocalise them. So, I decided that I was going to write them down. I think my initial idea may have been to post it on some kind of memorial website, but before I knew it I found myself signing up to a free blog hosting site instead. I don’t know why I eventually chose to post it as a blog; as much as I enjoy writing I’d never actually considered starting a blog before. And even when I was creating this one I had no intention of doing anything on it other than publishing the post about my dad. That’s the reason this blog is called Laid Bare, I was exposing my emotions, and innermost thoughts more than I ever would do in person.
So with the death of my dad Laid Bare was born. And that would’ve been that except for the unexpectedly overwhelming response. I’d posted links to the post on both twitter and facebook, as I have done with all of my posts since. I don’t have many twitter followers, and I have even fewer facebook “friends”, so I didn’t expect that many people to read it. What I didn’t bank on was my sister reposting the link on her facebook wall. My sister is a hell of a lot more social than I am, not to mention considerably friendlier, and is far more active on facebook with over 250 “friends”. Because of my sister many more people than I would ever have imagined read my words and they were actually being touched by them. The comments left underneath that link, on both mine and my sister’s facebook page, were very complimentary. At my dad’s funeral I had total strangers praising my writing, and telling me how much it moved them. Even considering the subject matter of the blog I couldn’t help but feel very proud of it. It was during the few days after the funeral that I decided I was going to carry on with the blog. It was actually due to a bit of a rant I was having on twitter one day; I’d got to about the fifth or sixth tweet of my rant, having struggled to word each one as such that it didn’t exceed the character limit but still made some kind of sense, when it dawned on me that it would be a lot easier to write a blog about it instead. I got home from work that day and I sat down and wrote my second blog post ‘What’s In a Profile?’
It was from there that I started getting more interested in blogging. I’ll admit it can be a real struggle to think of something to write about at times, and even with a subject firmly in mind it’s not always easy to turn my scrambled thoughts into a coherent and legible essay. Thankfully it’s not always a struggle; there are some posts that practically write themselves, with me fighting to keep up as the sentences flood out of my head. Then the difficulty is keeping focused on the subject matter and not flying off in all the directions my random thoughts can take me. Whatever the case though, I really do enjoy writing, and I get a thrill out of publishing my thoughts for anyone in the world to read. Not that many people do, I have a very small audience consisting mainly of my closest friends, but that’s enough for me. To be honest I’d still do it even if I didn’t think anyone was reading it at all. Sure I’d love to have thousands of people eagerly anticipating my every post, but in reality that’s never going to happen. I’m not a celebrity and there’s no specific theme to my blog; I have no call girl insights into the clandestine goings on of the sex trade. I’m not an Hispanic gossip monger scrawling damning doodles over tabloid photographs of celebrities. I don’t write about football, politics, food, fashion, or the latest technologies (besides the odd mention of robot monkey butlers), and I’ve never been at the centre of any controversy. I’m just a personal blogger with a penchant for ranting, and as such my blog has little appeal to anyone outside of my social circle (although The Danger of Spooning tends to get quite a bit of random traffic; you’d be surprised at the amount of people that Google the words ‘spooning’ and ‘fart’). The people who do read my blog regularly (mostly) enjoy it, or at least they say they do, and that makes me happy.
My blog has changed quite a bit since that first post. Originally I just had it on the default look, plain and simple, because that’s all it needed to be. It wasn’t until after about three or four months that I started playing around with the design: changing the background and colour scheme. Adding the short description under the blog name, and writing the little ‘about me’ biog. A few months later, after I’d got several posts published, I added the ‘popular posts’ widget, which had the added advantage of making sure my dad always appears on the blog whatever page you’re looking at (unless you’re viewing it on a mobile phone, as I’d chosen the option to optimise the blog for mobile screens). The most recent changes have been adding labels to my posts and arranging them in a cloud at the bottom of the page. And finally, adding a feature that shows my latest tweets. I’m sure that’s not the last of the changes either; I’ll carry on tweaking the look of the blog, adding and removing features as my mood dictates, for as long as I carry on writing it. I don’t think it’s just the look of the blog that’s changed, but the content has too; I’ve experimented a little bit and tried different ideas. I’m extremely proud of each and every one of my posts, but I do feel overall that my writing, and style, has improved as I’ve gone on.
And so here I am, a year later, writing my eighteenth blog post. All in all, and compared to other bloggers, eighteen posts in a year isn’t many at all. Compared to someone like Richard Herring, who has managed to write a post in his blog Warming Up for every single day of just over nine years, my pissy little average of one and a half posts a month is a somewhat embarrassingly small achievement. But it is an achievement nonetheless, and I never set out to be a modern day Samuel Pepys, I just wanted to indulge myself in an activity I find quite satisfying. None of the posts I’ve subsequently published have attracted anywhere near the kind of attention that the one about my dad did, and I suspect that the vast majority of the people who told me I should keep on writing haven’t even read a single one of them. But that’s okay. This blog only exists because my dad died and I didn’t know what to do, or how to express my grief. Now every time I publish a post here I’m reminded of my dad, and to me, no matter what I write about, this blog will always be a tribute to him. So I will finish this post as I did that very first one...
I love you dad. I miss you. And I’ll always remember you.
