Today a friend of mine, thinking she was being hilarious, sent me a link to a news story, reporting that neurotic women are more likely to blog. Apparently this is because they blog to “assuage loneliness or in an attempt to reach out and form social connections with others.”
Presumably my hilarious friend thought that as I’m a woman and I blog, I must be neurotic. Actually I think she was probably basing it on more solid evidence, such as my tendency to phone her to check whether she thinks it’s ‘normal’ for me to need to pee whenever I get anxious about anything (answer, no, but it’s not the end of the world so don’t stress about it), or whether the pain in my wrist might be early onset arthritis (answer, shut up, don’t be an idiot) or the itching on my legs is a sign of bed-bugs (answer, don't you dare bring them to our house).
Ok, so I’ll admit it, I’m a little neurotic (see various Ally McBeal references) but if I’m neurotic and female and I blog, does that mean the reason I blog is neuroticism?
I don’t think so. I know I’m not doing this because of loneliness – I have lots of friends and I’m soon going to be living in very close quarters with the hilarious friend and her boyfriend (they’ve loaned me their couch for the remainder of my time in London), which, granted may result in all three of us wishing we were lonely. And I’m pretty sure I’m not trying to reach out for social connections – I get enough of those via facebook… So why am I doing this?
Firstly, I’m enjoying it. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything other than emails and reports, longer still since I’ve written anything that wasn't about someone else's creativity (English Lit. Degree).
When I was young I used to write down pretty much every thought that came into my head – poems, short stories, detailed explanations of exactly why I fancied X, Y and/or Z. Then a few months or years later I'd go back and read these various confessions / odes to youth and I was invariably embarrassed and appalled by this younger uncooler self, and generally destroyed the evidence. So for a while I stopped writing for fear of embarrassing some older, wiser version of me (I don't think I'm getting any cooler - if anything it's all downhill from here). But now, while I know that in 5 years time I might be horrified at the sound of my 26 year old voice, I don’t care. 31 year old self, back off, I say.
I’m also finding the whole process quite therapeutic (have I just contradicted myself and proven I’m doing this because I’m neurotic?). It’s proving a great way to think through the larger issues at hand and to take a step back from the nitty-gritty-visa-moving-generalhannah-crap. No one wants to know the smaller details of what’s going through my brain the majority of the time, because it sounds a little like this: ||: “has the [insert name of various long-awaited forms] arrived? I hope it’s arrived. What if it hasn’t arrived? What if I don’t get the visa in time? What if I don’t get permission to leave the country and can’t come back for my wedding?”:|| See? Boring.
Last time when I moved for my masters, all I thought about before I moved was visas and degrees (finishing mine and applying for the next) and GRE numeracy exams (world confession - I scored in the 20th percentile for maths and 90th for verbal [UK people, that means 80% of test-takers were better than me at maths and 10% were better than me at English]... if they'd just have asked me I'd have told them as much.) So when I finally got over there, I'd prepared for the immediate but not the long-term. I hadn't given a thought to missing family or friends or baked beans. But, in blogging I have to not think on insignificant-repeat for a few moments and actually think about getting married, moving countries and its implications.
So really, one might argue that by blogging I am giving voice to my saner, less-neurotic self, and in fact it's the stable person within me who wants to blog. Have I convinced anyone? I didn't think so.
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