Why would a busy person like me take the time to blog? I’ll try to answer that question here.
Blogging is an alternative to therapy!
When I first heard about the ‘blogging phenomenon’, I thought it sounded a) self-indulgent, b) meaningless c) a total time-waster. I was also thinking that my life wasn’t interesting enough..

But then I started having second thoughts about my career, my life, the opposite sex, society in general.. I suppose you could say I was having a small life-crisis.

What should a tech-savvy girl do when faced with a small life crisis and a mild depression? Start popping Prozac to relieve the symptoms? Start boring all her friends and dates with badly structured thoughts and reflections? Spend her hard-earned cash and valuable time with a psychotherapist (who will likely just poke a stick in and make the problem worse… ) ?
Famous Diarist: Helen Keller
The answer appeared to me while reading a magazine about the ‘healing powers of keeping a journal’ . The answer is ‘Keeping a journal where I discuss the thoughts and feelings that are on my mind.’ It’s psychotherapy for free! Apparently people who keep a personal journal are psychologically healthier than those who don’t. I have heard this said several times in different contexts. There must be some truth to it.

However keeping a traditional journal is boring! Nobody would read it but me. If I knew that nobody would read it, the entries would probably end up being rather cryptical and badly structured as I would think ‘well,I know what I mean here, so why clarify…? Looking at the diaries that I kept while I was a teenager at boarding school, they were not very neatly written and full of rather repetitive ramblings.
Famous Diarist: Anne Frank
Also, a physical diary can be lost (as happened with most of my school-day diaries. Those were accidentally thrown away by somebody on the school staff during a holiday. Hundreds of hours of effort and memories sent to the recycling plant just like that…) An online diary on the other hand, can be backed up in hundreds of different ways, from paper printouts, via DVDs to online archiving or even a pen-drive! This journal is going nowhere.

Another benefit will hopefully be the comments that readers give on my entries. They could bring a healthy perspective, encouragement or advice from people from all walks of life, all around the world.

Diarists who Inspire

I was aware of a few great diarists growing up: Anne Frank obviously, but also Helen Keller, Samuel Pepys and Anais Nin. I am sure I am forgetting someone important though! Anyway, it seemed to me that interesting and fascinating people kept a diary. I have since become aware that many famous, successful and admirable people keep diaries which are often used by their biographers.
Anne Frank’s First Diary
I recieved a textile bound diary with a flower pattern and a little brass lock on my eleventh birthday. I then started to keep a diary during that year of my life. I was aware that I was the same age as Anne Frank when she started her famous diary. Touched by her extraordinary talent and tragic destiny I often started my entries with “Dear Kitty”, like Anne did!

Sadly I became disillusioned with diaries within about a year, when my mother decided she had a juste cause to read mine (despite having promised not to.) I felt violated and didn’t keep a diary again until boarding school, where I was fairly certain I could keep it private.

At university I wasn’t intersted in diary writing, and wasn’t as reflective as I normally am. When I started working I didn’t feel I had anything worthwhile to write about. And I am short of energy and time..

This blogging project came about when I took some time off during autumn 2006. Normally I do not have the time or energy to set up a project like this.

Why Blog in English?

As you may have guessed, my mother tongue is not English, but Swedish. I started learning English at the age of nine or ten. Now I live in England and work in a fully English environment.

I still mostly think in Swedish though. So why don’t I blog in Swedish? Well, there are only 9 million speakers of Swedish… Plus, in Sweden everybody knows everybody else. I would be quite easily recognisable, which is not something I am interested in. Somebody who knows me would come across this blog fairly soon. If I blog in English, like-minded people from all over the world can read my entries and I really like that idea!

Anonymity

Since I am going to be very honest in my blog, so I’ll blog under a pseudonym. I really wouldn’t want to have to censor myself in what I am writing, for the fear of what my friends and family would make of it. The few photos of me that are on this site are real though - I feel that the risk of somebody stumbling across them by complete chance is fairly miniscule. Also, I believe in visual impressions and I think it is easier to understand somebody if you can picture them in your head.

By using a pseudomym, snooping friends, collegues or relatives who ‘google’ my real (relatively unusual) name, will not end up on this page. (And believe me, people do run the names of people they know through Google, so the likelyhood of that happening is fairly large - in fact a friend of mine already owned up to having done it!)

What they’ll find when they Google me is my professional CV, my LinkedIn account and some postings that I have made to newsgroups. Nothing too personal, and certainly not my personal ‘diary’, e.g. this blog. I’ll tell them about this site if/when I feel like it! My own name is nor unlike the name I am using here though. It has seven letters (the European spelling, not the Anglo) and appears in the Gospel of Luke.

Neither will I use the real name of anybody that I am writing anything personal about.

Perhaps this diary can help me learn to be more upfront about who I really am though, and what I really think about things.
Technorati Tags: blog, psychotherapy, shrink