guest post: why i love...blogging

hi there, this is melissa and i'm delighted to fill in for cb today while she is going on a great travel adventure with her husband. today i'm sharing with you why i love blogging- i hope you enjoy it, because this turned into a bit of a deep and personal piece. thanks cb for having me as her guest today!

for as long as i could do it, i have loved to write. when i was fice years old, i started my first journal. it was pink, with hearts on its cover and a tiny lock and key to protect it from snopping eyes. as i grew up, my journal entries started to focus on the inevitable- boys. there is definitely an entire journal dedicated to my seventh grade crush. in high school, i joined the yearbook staff and offered to write the captions for pictures. and i kept writing those journals, which became an outlet for my teenage angst.

 by college, i eagerly arrived at the school newspaper's office during orientation week and signed up to be a studen journalist. this is it, i thought as i left the building, giddy with excitment, this is where i belong. and i was right - i started out writing the articles that none of the senoir members wanted to do, and by the end of freshman year, i was elected to become a section editor. i was ecsatic about this because i wasn't usually the sort of person who had the guts to run against the competitors for a positition like that, but my passion for writing outweighted my timidity.

i continued working as an editor throughout college, and i loved everthing about i - covering cool events and coming up with meaningful features, staying at the newspaper office until 2 a.m. before publication, and having a great circle of newspaper friends who were evern bigger journalism nerds then i was. some of my fondest memories from college occured in that tiny newspaper office.

and then i graduated. i missed a lot of things about college, but most of all, i missed the newspaper. i just didn't realize it yet. without regular outlet for my writing, i felt lost. after spending about a year and a half trying to find myself, i turned back to journaling to try and sort things out, and it hit me - i had already found myself, many years ago. i was (and and) a writer. i love vocabulary, turns of phrases, and punctuation, and my best thinking occurs when i put it on a piece of paper. it's just who i am.

around the same, time i stumbled up a cup of jo. something about reading her work really resonated with me - at first, i felt invasive reading about a stranger's life, but then i realized that's sort of what blogs are all about - self expression to be shared with, well, whoever is willing to read it (in joanna's case, that's a hefty amount of people)

this led me to find more blogs to read. inside of relaxing from a long day by watching tv, i read blogs. i was happy simply being a consumer of blogs and keeping my own private journal, until a few months into dating my boyfriend. he and a friend were starting a blog about beer, and he would eagerly show me new post and updated layouts. then it hit me -  if he can do this, i certainly can too.

so on july 1, 2009, i started oh, my darling (nostafia hits when i click back to the first post) somewhere between 0 and 5 people read it per day, but that was okay with me. i had jumped right back into my passion, in a new and exciting way. i was writing again, about whatever the heck struck my fancy that day. my posting ebbed and flowed throughtout the year, bu i always knew it was there, if the desire to write struck. and then, i really started to focus on it this may. writing so regularly rejuvenated me, and the blog became an integral part of my summer. little by little, i watched as my readership grew, and now i am astontished and humbled by how many great ladies out there are stopping to check out the posts.

whew! all this is to say why i love blogging, right? at its core, i love blogging because it allows me to write. and i can share that writing with other people out thee who care about the same things i do, and who belong to the same little blogging community that i do. on the flip side, i love to soak in the writing of others, too, and to support their creative endeavors, because i think that it is so important to write, if that's what keeps you happy, like it does for me. we're all basically keeping the grown-up versions of little pink journals, just with the lock wide open this time around.

images via: amazon, chelleline, here, here, a cup of jo, don't waste promises , the keep calm shop