Stephen Mosher On Blogging

 

I started writing stories when I was a kid.   I would write reviews of books I read or movies I saw, draw pictures and turn them in to my second grade English teacher.  I didn’t get extra credit, I didn’t need extra credit, I just needed someone to read what I wrote.  I always loved words.  I loved sentences.  I loved the artistry of formulating thoughts on paper.  I loved the poetry of creating the stories. 

I always have.

My writing took a back seat to my acting.  My acting took a back seat to my photography.  I never, though, lost the desire to write.  I simply had to tell stories in other ways for a couple of decades. 

Then one day the internet was invented.  I had an audience.  In the early days of the internet I would write stories about my experiences around New York City and I would email them to all my friends.  I did not think I was imposing on them, I thought I was a good enough writer that they would want to read them.  I thought the stories, the writing, the lessons were nice enough to inspire people.  I did not know that I had a wrong idea until a friend wrote and asked me, in a not particularly friendly manner, to leave them the heck alone and stop bothering them with my minutia.   Another friend wrote to me and asked if it didn’t embarrass me, being so indiscreet with the details about my life.  Another blocked me from emailing them.  These were not subtle messages.

So I stopped.

I still wrote.  I wrote in blank books, on legal pads, in the air, in the sand, in my mind and on the palm of my hand.  I wrote down my thoughts, my feelings, my wishes, my dreams, my visions for the future.  I kept them to myself.  I never wrote fiction because I did not have the gift of creation in that way.  Also, there was enough wild shit going down in my own life to feed the writing keys of the computer and the ramblings of the prose.  I stored what I wrote and kept it for only myself, convinced that it was not worthy of being read.

One day I heard about this thing called Myspace.  I joined Myspace.  There was a Notes feature where people could ramble on, ad nauseum, about their lives.  I did.  I posted many things on my Myspace page, some of the quite good, I thought.  One day Myspace was replaced by a thing called Facebook.  It also had a Notes feature.  I could do my rambling there.  For a while I rambled on Myspace and Facebook and something I found called Blogger, a website where people did exactly what I had been doing all those years but they had audiences to read their ramblings.  I had a community.  There were people who blogged about anything and there were people who blogged with great specificity.  People were being creative with words and ideas, sharing knowledge and opinions, making friends and making a new world on the internet of web loggers.  It was fun and it was an outlet, and there was no opportunity for people to criticize you for expressing yourself.  Well, sometimes there were trolls who made comments and sent emails but you could choose, or not, to let it upset you.

I blogged on Myspace, on Facebook, on Blogger, on Livejournal and, finally, on Stephen Mosher Com.

Only, I was doing it less and less.  I had less to say.  I had less I wanted to share.  I had already blogged about the divas, the hot guys, the stories I had lived, the art I had seen.  I had begun to live in a black place, thanks to soul sucking line of work, and I could not be the blogger who specialized in misery.  The entries were happening with months in between them.  I wasn’t a blogger anymore.  I was just a dude who, six times a year, announced on Facebook that he had a new blog up.  That’s not blogging.  When you are a blogger you owe your audience a story a day.  You have an obligation to your public.  Some bloggers spend all their days collecting stories and photos off the internet, creating their personal comments on world events and the topic of their particular interest.  There are bloggers whose lives are nothing but their work.

That’s not my life.

I have nothing left to say.  I have no more stories to tell.  Furthermore, I have no more desire to tell stories.  I have no desire to open myself up.  I’ve been doing it for many years, all the while telling my husband that “people just take chunks out of you”.   It is the dichotomy of being me.  I wanted to share myself.  I wanted to share my stories.  I believe in story telling.  It is through sharing our stories that we learn one another, that we see inside each other.

Only I’m empty.

I have to refill, refuel, reexamine.   I want to spend my life experiencing life, not writing about it and not reading about it on other peoples’ blogs.  I loved my time as a blogger.  I loved the occasional feedback that I got from my audience.  It was often quite validating and uplifting.  I often felt that, by sharing my experiences, I might have made a difference for some people, changed some perceptions, helped some lives.   But times change.  People grow.  Life evolves.  Things end. 

This is my time of change, my time to grow.  This is my evolution.

This is the end.

 

Peace,

Ste