Five Years of From The Morgue

Kinda incredibly, today marks five years of blogging. My blog can pull on its big backpack and go off to school for the first time.
939 entries, over 250K words, and I still haven’t internalised this blogging thing. I still see myself as “person who blogs” rather than “blogger”. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a niche? If my blog was a definite sort of thing, then I can imagine starting to identify as the person or does that thing. But I’m still not sure, after five years, what I’m doing with this blog, and maybe that stops me calling myself “blogger”.
I think I know why I do it though. Well, there are lots of reasons – its nice to write stuff and know people read it, of course. Its even nicer when people talk back to you, in comments (4250 of those so far) or in person. It supports my vanity and my humility both; vanity because people read at all, humility because stupid things I say get thrown back at me in comments scant minutes later.
It’s a good way to feel like I’m staying in touch with a lot of people I wouldn’t otherwise stay in touch with. In part, this blog fills the role of the old SCFBBS that was a big part of my university social life – I feel like the posts on this blog form part of a bigger conversation with many people I like and even some I don’t know at all.
Most of all, I have realised that I blog because it makes me think. It prompts me to engage with things I’m reading, with issues of the day, with odd events that happen to me, and apply my brain to them. Transforming thoughts into words is a fascinating process and this blog nudges me go through that process for all kinds of things that might go unexamined otherwise. It helps me figure out what I want to think about something. It lets me try out ideas. It often reveals thoughts I didn’t know that I had; more frequently still, it makes me generate thoughts I certainly wouldn’t reach any other way.
So thanks to Iona, who first sowed the idea of blogging in my head. Thanks to David, who actually dragged me in and whose generous hosting of the additiverich collective has continued without pause. Thanks to all of you who read and comment and linky. I still don’t know exactly what sort of blog this is, but I hope it is some kind of interesting.
And as a small reward of sorts for those who’ve made it through my navel-gazing, I give you:
every From The Morgue post on one loooong page.