Morton’s Fork / I’d Rather Write

Writing is taking an active stance; reading other blogs is more passive, most  especially, if it doesn’t elicit any reaction from the reader whatsoever. The former is participative; the latter more like window shopping. You stop — either to take a peek, glance at the display content, or wallow in there for sometime if it got you interested on what’s in there. You are either wowed by what’s on display, exclaim words of excitement that may move you to get inside to buy something. Or, you’d simply walk away just as instantly as when you stopped by it. Similarly, in visiting a blog site, you either click on the like button, comment on its content as a reaction or click away from the site just as fast without reading the content. The stimuli is external.

Writing requires much more stimulant or motivations, other of course than the WordPress prompts and challenges that we have now. Unlike others who find it quite easy to write a piece, it is for me always difficult and quite a daunting task. Before I started blogging, I needed internal motivation, an urge, a driving force to push me to write. And it took quite a time despite my friend’s proddings for me to have a blogsite because of the nature of my advocacy work. The major reason? Well, first, I had to battle over my lack of confidence to write using the English language which is not my mother tongue. Although it is one of the official medium of instruction in our schools, I never fully got over such lack of confidence in me. Only after gathering enough courage and recognizing the help and advantages blogging provide, primarily in organizing my many thoughts that I only used to jot down on notebooks, have I started writing. As defense mechanisms and self-motivations, I used to say: “Forget grammar and correct tenses. Just write.” “Let this be my English writing composition practice. I am not a native English speaker anyway. Besides, who’d bother to read my interests. So be it!” What was intended to be a simple journal and report of my activities soon evolved. It became an outlet: sharing my moods, woes, joys, of being be; I linked with blogs related with my posts, or anything that I find interesting. Soon, I realized that simple English is enough to get my message through. With the WP stats, I witnessed the slow but steady growth of people visiting my blogsite. Reaching over a 100,000 mark was unimaginable; it surprised me to know that what I thought to be trivial could be of interest to others too.

Reading other blogs eventually became a natural consequence after overcoming the major battle of finally being able to confidently write in a language I used to “fear.” Especially so, when DP Challenges came up. As such, I read other blogs more often than ever now. And thank those who care to drop by mine.

Though writing remains a struggle, the time I spent is always worth it. The final click to publish the post to release my thoughts from one to the other is like a free spirit flying into the unknown…never knowing where it would land, whose spirit it would gently tap.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/daily-prompt-17/

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