Blogging - a worrier's thoughts

So, I thought to myself, the best way to get my thoughts out of my head (so dangerous to keep them in there with work due) and to share them with a vast, potentially faceless, community is to set up a blog.

Articulating ones thoughts is therapeutic, cathartic, but almost certainly narcissistic, surely? My dissertation for my final year centres around women's diaries: it seems that for hundreds of years people have been recording their thoughts in this deeply personal way. Who hasn't read Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf and thought 'wow, that's a real insight into that time, or place, or situation'.

Diaries seem to have become, at least in the minds of many critics, a women's medium. The feminist within me argues that this is because is a wholly patriarchal literary world, it is one of the few openings for personal thought that women have left. I don't know how I'm going to dispel or argue this in 8000 words that will hopefully cement my first, but we'll see. Our fascination for exploring the lives of others is apparent through the popularity of novel such as Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary, a personal favourite, not least because I can see some of myself in the hapless, hopeless central character. Of course, this was entirely Fielding's intention: Bridge (we're on personal terms) is an every-woman for that single, 30-year-old career woman that we all are, have been, or expect to become.

I've kept a hand-written diary for 6 years. Sad, maybe, but to return to my earlier point, is it narcissistic? I'm not sure whether my diary has an intended reader, but my blog does, and that's you, if you've got this far! Is diary-writing for those who feel they have no one to talk to, those who have a lot to say, or those who just enjoy the sound of their own voice (keyboard). Things to ponder, for sure.