I’m closing
down this blog, because it no longer serves a purpose. I opened it many years
ago because I felt I wanted to write and discover myself through words. That I
keep on doing, but on a different level, and I no longer feel I have anything
worth saying until I have a finished work that sparks a real conversation. This
space was an honest yet slightly lacking medium (I rarely stuck to coherence or
proofread, I exalted many traits of my personality I no longer like that much,)
and I’d like to move on to new platforms where I can present a bit more of
quality along insight. I might not be ready for taking that step yet, but the
magic of life is that one is seldom ready for any experience and yet there is
some unknown forces that help emerging victorious from it.
The nicest
experience I got through ranting on this space was connecting to people. In a
way, people that cared about me felt closer and less inhibited by reading my
entries, even at times when I was doing a really bad job at keeping in touch or
at breaking the initial ice. If I hadn’t
had this blog, I wouldn’t know what was like to feel encouraged to keep on
writing. Friends from unlikely corners of the world (Finland, Malaysia,
Iceland, U.S., Austria) quoted the blog when talking to me and that felt
amazing. I was able to meet the new people and tell them: “well, you know, I
have a blog, but I don’t think it’s that great” and then I would get the
surprise later that they read most if not all of the entries. They noted I had
changed, and when I go back and read how “matter-of-fact-ish” I was (you know,
when everything in your life is such a huge event that OMG) I feel the
temptation to find a way to travel to the past and slap my former past out of
it. With this blog also came much valued criticism such as that of English
native speakers correcting grammar mistakes, idiomatic expressions that sounded
obscure or unnatural. A guy in the UK read some entries back in 2011 and
thought it was mostly ok but “it had that pedantic tone” he would get rid of. I
had to start by truly understanding what he meant by pedantic, and then apply
myself to watch the tone from that moment on. It was an incredibly valuable
lesson that proves of relevance even today.
This blog
is many disperse things because that’s how life is, and I wanted to depict
myself naturally that way. The problem (?) with writing is that, for it to be
taken seriously, it has to have coherence; writing has to have a goal or some much
needed boundaries to appeal to an audience and to build up on a series of
related topics – even if is for entertainment. We revere literary genres, which makes sense
because an critical reader wishes to obtain specific knowledge or a sensation
while reading and not to be left entirely to the imagination and whimsical
designs of the writer. In the process of shifting from humanitarian to mundane,
from queer-oriented to travel blogger, I feel like I entertained but couldn’t
really develop much. When I was building up an audience, a certain post on a
different and radical direction would throw them off. And you know what to say:
Jack of all trades, master of none.
Through
this space, something beautiful happen that I never dreamed to live. I
earned the respect of my close friends. I might have pushed some to start
reading in general. It got to a point in which those same close friends were the only ones
writing to me, all very excited about the latest entry and even willing to
share their feelings and opinions about it in an intimate way they never
expressed before. There isn’t a bigger reward than having one of your best
buddies telling you “how do I do to write as beautifully as you?”
My mom told
me this morning that if I believed this was a serious job (staying home finishing
my novel) I should treat it as such and not yield to the anxiety of feeling I’m
wasting oxygen or to the thought that people around disapprove. Those words are
a gift, especially because writing is an often solitary and misunderstood path
when you have not published yet. My mom’s words give me even more courage to
keep on going.
In short,
closing this blog is not giving up on my writing at all but rather take a break
from not taking it as seriously as I want my writing to be. Do you see those
bloggers/columnist people follow? I could become one of those, but I need time
and more dedication, maybe some research and learning of trades even. Have you
heard about novelists promoting their books and people taking them seriously?
That’s my new life goal. So until I come up with a blog that can also serve as
a catalogue of how seriously I take writing this little baby off.
It was a
fun ride. And thanks to everyone who ever read and made me feel my words were
worth something.
