Switching from Journals to Blogs

I’ve done some blogging over the past decade in Tumblr and academia.edu, but now that I have a site all to myself I feel obliged to make a more of an effort. Blogs to me are a lot like journals and I’ve been keeping journals since I was a teenager. That was in the olden days when people only wrote on paper. I still have my earliest journals and they sit on my shelf along side more recent ones. The first one I kept, which looks like a bound book, was the Kahil Gibran diary for 1977. That was when I was a teenager, hooked on David Bowie and anything ‘spiritual’. My first e-journal was kept between 1995-98, when I was in South Korea. Now I keep journals on my laptop and in a spiral notebook. While I have used some of my e-journals for essays and other creative writing, I haven’t dared to look back at my early paper journals for writing material – I don’t know if I want to step into the mind of my younger self or relive the angst and anxiety of my youth. As for this blog, it will serve in some ways like my journals, with thoughts about writing and the world. But I’m still keeping an e-journal (about my life in France) and my spiral notebook for my deepest emotions and thoughts I don’t care to share with the world just yet.