"Journaling" Question

I am gratified at the response to my question about your questions.  It is interesting to me to know what it is that readers want to know.  I would have never guessed at the questions that people seem to have.  So, thank you!  I'll tackle the questions in order here, post by post.  Here's the first:

Conina -- I think it's amazing the way you've continued blogging through all these years, in an area of the blogosphere where people crop up and can disappear so quickly. I've been a sporadic writer of journals all my life (since I was 11 or so). I've only been reading here for about two years, sorry to say I haven't pored back through your archives so it's possible you've already written an answer there.

SO - my question is - have you always journaled? If yes, do you attribute the long life of your blog, your continued interest in posting here, to that? Or does blogging fill a need for an outlet, or...?

I am not a lifelong journal writer.  I grew up in a house with three younger brothers, and they were into EVERYTHING all the time.  Too, my parents were great believers in "parental sovereignty," and there were no privacy rights in their household.  There were no locked doors, or locked drawers, or even locked diaries of the sort that I remember my girlhood friends had.  In the house I grew up in, writing your inmost thoughts down was likely to mean that they were going to be the topic of discussion around the dinner table.  I was a lover of words, and I did love to write, but I poured my words into angst-riddled adolescent poems that were more cryptic, and gave me a "plausible deniability."  All these many years later, I still have the tattered folder full of those dreadful poems penned on scraps of paper so many, many years ago.  This one, in particular reminds me of the girl that was:

Golden fallen autumn leaves   Caught in an evergreen  Hanging there like ornaments  On early Christmas trees.  Out of place, yet somehow right  Like autumn flowers, blooming bright  Speak to me  Of what I have become.

All I am, and all that I will be  Is different from the plans they made for me.  I'm just a colored autumn leaf that's flown  To occupy a place not quite my own.

I began to write in this blogging format at Tom's insistence.  It was His response to my sense of isolation and uncertainty in the early days of our power dynamic.  Without a local community of like-minded others, I worried and obsessed about what I "should" be doing, and whether or not I was "doing it right."  The command that I write about my life and my worries and my efforts was to help me develop the connections within the community that would strengthen me and put my mind at ease.  I was not an eager blogger in the beginning.  I did it because He told me to do it...

But then, I got caught by the whole business.  Today, I write here because I want to write.  I have periods of time when I find myself quiet, and this blog sits for long periods of time without me finding anything to say.  I read what others write in those days, but there are no words of my own sometimes.  Then, for whatever reason, the ideas pop up again, and I come back to writing my thoughts and my days here.  I think the ebb and flow here is more placid than it once was.  I am not as frantic about how "right" or "wrong" our lives are in contrast to others.  We have lived our way to something more steady and secure, and I am no longer that fussy, obsessive, worried submissive that first ventured out onto the blogging stage.  Nowadays, I tend to say what I say, with far less need to justify or teach or find deep meaning in all of it.  It is what it is.  I am what I am.

And that seems a very long way from that young girl that saw herself in a place that was "out of place."

swan