All the Blogs a Stage

Tom Loughlin has some thoughts on blogging as performance. As someone who has often asserted that I don't blog for an audience, I will offer a different point of view. When I am most motivated to write, as opposed to merely post or share some banal account of the day to day is when there is some interior experience that is uncomfortable, and writing it down in a blog post externalizes it. Gets it out from "in here" to "out there," where I can examine it and discharge some amount of the emotional charge. Is it true? Why do I believe this? I don't do that to entertain anyone. That is quite particularly, specifically, a selfish act. Perhaps one of "self-care." Is it a "performance" to persuade or provoke? I don't think so, mostly because Groundhog Day and, later, Facebook disillusioned me of the notion that I can ever change anyone's mind about anything. (To be fair, I can't recall a blog post that changed my mind about anything either.) So I don't even try. We live in a world where we…