Welcome to yet another attempt at a blog

I'm not sure exactly why I'm doing this. Perhaps because I am nearly always a couple of years behind everyone else. Perhaps I'm feeling left behind in the fad to expose my private self on the internet. I only managed to set up Facebook a couple of months ago, updated it obsessively for a week and now I keep forgetting to visit the page. I tried to maintain a website for a year or so - it became a huge task to maintain but I kept at it. About a year in, I realised that it was a slog, I wasn't enjoying it and I haven't added anything to it in nearly three years, although I've kept the URL just in case I get the urge to go back to it.

Basically, I find the act of creation very difficult. In my everyday life, the real world, I have to "create" "stuff" all the time, whether it's words, plans, budgets or messaging. I think the fact I spend all day trying to be creative, no matter how limited the fashion, makes it that much harder for me to want to even bother to try in my personal time.

I spend much of that personal time in supposedly wastrel pursuits: playing videogames, watching movies and reading books. All activities that engage my mind but nothing that involves me having to be productive. Slothful yes, but I've been content.

Now, however, I find myself worrying, perhaps needlessly, that I am wasting my time. Shouldn't I be penning that definitive novel, storyboarding the ultimate movie extravaganza, or, less ambitiously, starting a blog?

The big question when starting a blog is not why, or even how. The word I'm thinking about is who. Who is going to read this? I'm probably not going to tell my friends that I've started this in case I stop as abruptly as before. I'm not sure that I want my work colleagues to know. They are all incredibly bright people and beneath my confident exterior I am actually insecure. Will they criticise my thinking or mock my views? I'm not without my own intellectual resources but I have always been diffident about expressing my deeper thoughts and opinions. I am not an intellectual nor do I pretend to be on the level of A.N. Wilson. I enjoy reading certain blogs and I am intellectually provoked by people such as Keiron Gillen or Jim Rossignol but then they are professional writers. It is their business to entertain, provoke and stimulate discussion. I am not in their league.

This brings me to my last thought of the day. Why does anyone start a blog? Is there a level of self-awareness or pretentiousness to the process? So far, I have used "I" some 30 times. That's a lot of "I". I used to wonder about diaries. They purport to be personal musings but I believe that anyone who writes in a diary expects someone to read it at some point in the future. A diary is less about being truthful and more about presenting one's view of events as truth. Propoganda at its most basic level. They say history is rewritten by the winners, and sometimes history is created by the diarists. Most important to remember, nothing you read on the internet is absolute truth, it is merely one person's interpretation of events.