I picked up a new book about a week ago when my ex-boyfriend was visiting me (that weird occurrence seems to be a common one, for us) called "say everything" by Scott Rosenberg. It's just a story of how blogging began, and it is actually a rather fascinating read. I recommend it.

But I'm sitting here tonight, in a rather glum mood (sleeping for 24 hours straight seems to bring those on), mulling over that ex-boyfriend I mentioned. And I have to ask myself: why do we feel the need to say everything? Why does the human psyche give such a damn about being heard?

I don't really have an answer, but I do have a guess: It's therapeutic. That's the long and the short of it. Saying everything is a therapeutic endeavour that we all should try at one point or another. It doesn't even matter if anyone's listening, as long as we believe they're listening. This is what blogging, then Facebook Status Updates, and now Twitter is all about. (On a side-note, I'm being blessed with people who are listening because I have a kick-ass group of Twitter followers.)

I think that, from the time when we were keeping diaries, we have had trouble knowing ourselves. We have no idea how we sound, we forget what used to be important to us, and we cannot seem to get an outside view of ourselves. Writing things down helped that; we could recall that, at one point, the pants we wore to a party was more important to us than who went to the party. We could view something we wrote a month ago, and realise we were kind of an asshole. We could (maybe) consider whether we were still an asshole. For once, we could step outside our bodies and really get to know ourselves.

I think, over time, we've been developing simpler and simpler ways to do this, and simpler and simpler ways to share it. The act of making it simpler to do makes sense to me, and seems in line with the therapeutic self-improvement the form is meant to accomplish. But the sharing? I'm having trouble deciding why it's so important to people to easily share their thoughts, ideas, feelings, and things that should leave them feeling vulnerable with the world. Why did I challenge myself, not to write every single day, but to make a blog post every day? I can't answer for anyone but me.

I have a history of starting things and never finishing them. A terrible practice I try to get out of at every opportunity. One of the tricks I've learned, over the past few years, is that getting other people involved shames me into doing things. I'm ashamed of myself when I miss a post here. I'm ashamed of myself when I haven't made enough progress on a project other people are working towards. So I think, by sharing our innermost selves with the world, we're pushing ourselves to share more, engage in this therapy more. Writing is work, and even if it's good for us, we still need to get motivation to do it.

Why do you share?

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

-- Maya Angelou

This quote has been written on my wall for a little over a year now, I imagine. I rather like it, probably because it validates my vague feeling-based judgement of people. People fit a certain mould for me, fall into certain categories, based on feelings and vibes I get from them. Maybe that's weird. Maybe that's not. I don't know.

I've been thinking a bit about this, though. Matt, who I'm sure you'll hear plenty of as this blog continues, only stays in my life because of the way he makes me feel. He does terrible things to me, and generally doesn't treat me well, but he makes me feel better when I'm around him. So I keep putting myself around him.

Sometimes, I wonder how I make people feel. I tend to obsess over it; whether people feel like I'm rude, or unwanted, or not living up to their expectations. It's a constant, nagging fear at the forefront of my mind that makes it really hard for me to be natural in social situations. But I can do it when there's someone there with me, whose feelings towards me I know. It's weird, but having that one other person there gives me the ground to stand on that I need. Without that ground, I just can't... be myself. I don't know why having someone else there that I understand means so much to me, but it does.