My blog is 4 years old today!

My first post was called Why write this blog? I was a fourth year undergrad, less than a week from graduation. Now I’m a fourth year PhD student, and uh… more than a week from graduation. Are the reasons I began blogging the same as the reasons I continue to blog?

Why I started blogging 4 years ago

I love to write, but writing in an online forum, where anyone could be sitting at their computer reading my thoughts, has always made me feel too exposed and vulnerable. Time to get over that, especially since I hope to go into academia, where putting myself “out there” will be a key to success.

There’s a funny paradox: on the one hand I want people to read what I write, but on the other, it can be paralyzing to actually think about people reading it when I’m trying to get words out. I deal with this by imagining that only a few people will read. I imagine someone who’s my quintessential audience. Usually, that’s my mom (you’re reading, right, mom?!). She’s educated and curious, but she’s not a cognitive scientist. She’s my ideal reader. So I imagine my mom reading, and no one else, and I just go with it.

It’s still hard to express your thoughts when you think smart people are listening and might criticize them. It took me a long time to be able to do this in person — in group meetings and talks — and I have no idea if my blog helped me with that. Throughout grad school, my relationship with criticism has evolved. Criticism is almost always an opportunity for improving your work, and actually has very little to do with me as a person. When I think of it that way, criticism is something to seek out, not to avoid.

I want to keep learning, reading, and thinking about thinking, and I think the best way to do this is to collaborate as much as possible. I’ve loved having frequent opportunities during college for cog sci dialogues with so many people, and I don’t want to give those dialogues up.

Occasionally people engage with my posts in the comments or on social media, and it’s great to have those conversations.

It’s not the ideal platform for dialogue that I had hoped, but that’s ok.

I want to be a better reader, writer, and thinker, and this link convinced me that a blog is probably a good way to achieve that goal. In it, Maria Konnikova writes: “What am I doing but honing my ability to think, research, analyze, and write—the core skills required to complete a dissertation? And I’m doing so, I would argue, in a far more effective fashion than I would ever be able to do were I to keep to a more traditional academia-only route.”

Spot on.

Why I still blog today

When I started blogging, I couldn’t entirely anticipate what my blogging experience would actually be like. Four years later, I may have even more reasons to blog than I did when I started.

My blog is somewhat of a lab. I can try things out – like a vlog, an infographic, or that megaphone graphic above. Do they make my posts more engaging? I don’t know, but I’m testing them out. If they flop, no harm done. I experiment with different topics, and I can use metrics that show me numbers of page views and how those readers got to my site for a rough idea of what resonates with people and how they’re finding my blog.

My blog also acts as an archive. It documents events like conferences and workshops I’ve attended, getting married, and the 2016 Presidential election, all through the lens of language and thought. My past posts help me recommend a book to a friend or find a paper I know I liked but can’t remember why. And it gives me ample opportunities for laughing at my past self. Like did it occur to me that acknowledging my college graduation by writing a post about euthenics at Vassar was maybe a bit perverse??

And I blog because it’s fun. It’s challenging, and it’s creative, and I make the rules. Some of my motivations might be unique, but it turns out I’m not alone in blogging “for the love of words.” In a recent post on her blog, From the Lab Bench, Paige Jarreau compares science bloggers’ reasons for blogging to Orwell’s “four great motives for writing.”

I’m a long-range thinker, but I don’t think I would have predicted when I clicked the “PUBLISH” button for the first time that I’d be clicking it for many of the same reasons four years later.