I spent the month of January in Europe with Columbia College Chicago’s journalism department. My classmates and I were required to blog about our trip throughout the duration of the course, and I sort of really loved it.
Every writer tells themselves that they’ll start blogging. They’ll turn those 3am thoughts scribbled on cocktail napkins into narratives and actually finish the poems written during the cab ride home in the Notes application on their phones.
I’ve been telling myself this for years. I’ve got the half-filled Moleskins and heroic couplets to prove it.
After being forced to blog, I became addicted to it. When something remotely interesting happened, I would immediately think, “That would make a great blog post.” I thought that once I left Europe I would stop analyzing my day-to-day routine. If anything, I’ve begun to do it even more.
There’s a strange pleasure in blogging. It’s cathartic. It’s therapy, minus an uncomfortable chair and narcissistic woman asking me questions about my mother and kindergarten crush.
So I’m getting it out. All of the noise clogging my head and opinions that I can’t express. All of my bad ideas and amazing mistakes. I’m getting it out of my head. Out of my iPhone. Out of my diary and onto something I can’t crumple up and throw away when it doesn’t work out the way I planned it to. Something that requires me to be responsible for my words and actions and actually learn from all the dumb, reckless things I do.
Maybe someone else could learn from them, too.