The Big Blog Swap! Say Hi to Meagan

Hey all say Hi to Meagan, she is the poor person who has been swapped with me for the Big Blog Swap.

She can usually be found at her excellent blog, www.ladywholunches.net/blog, so, Meagan, its over to you....

After reading Claire's blog post about “Putting Away the Soap Box” and how fed up she is about trying to blog for PR, and realizing that she is ready to blog for blog's sake, I thought, what better way to post a guest blog than to discuss why it is that I actually starting blogging? (and how many times can I put the word “blog” in a blog entry?)

Why not get down to the nitty gritty? Remember why I started this thing in the first place.

Why is it that I find myself up at 11 o'clock on a Friday night telling the world wide web about that boy I saw riding a bus, and how he affected me so much in my yearning to understand English culture that I felt the need to write about it? Why do I spend four hours searching for a new template to make my blog look that much prettier and more easily accessible? Why do I consistently check my emails looking for comments made to my little blog, and hoping I've made a small difference? Why has it become so much more than just a blog, but more like my own created world, my own Avatar, my personal diary?

Why not write this guest post about how I hope that one day when I'm long gone, someone (possibly my future children) will be able to read my ramblings and try to make sense of who they think I was? Why I think it's not as romantic as finding a handwritten diary, but that by sharing thoughts and feelings online, I can cross my fingers that I help someone else sort out their own thoughts and feelings? Why do I feel I have made friends, real friends, through this chronicle of the lady who lunches? Why have I found out more about my own family through this journey?

But all those questions came later, after I'd already been in the blogosphere for a year. Those are all queries I have come up with now. Those are all things I've figured out after a year of my nonsensical, meandering musings.

In the beginning, that wasn't so. In fact, I had no clue what I was really getting myself into.

The big decision to start this weird internet affair began way before. It came after I found myself in love with a British man I had met one night in Las Vegas for eight hours. After eight months of phone calls, emails, month long visits here and there, we needed to make a decision about our future. He couldn't stay in the United States for longer than three months, and although I could quite easily secure a visa in the UK (due to family relations), I had a budding (er, or maybe flailing) acting career in Los Angeles. But, after a few more months of discussions and realizations that acting didn't mean the same thing to me that it used to mean to me, I moved here to England.

The first four months in Great Britain were dire. We had little to no money, no car, no jobs, and we were moving in between his parents house in Portsmouth and friend's couches in Bristol. I was experiencing extreme culture shock (which was even more surprising since I wasn't expecting it after having lived in Paris before), and found myself confused, bored and unsettled.

So, why, may you ask, did I think writing about it would help out?

I'm no fancy pants. I didn't have any high or noble aspirations. I started to write to my family. I wanted them to know how I was doing, and felt that if I could reach out to them, then we would all be comforted in the fact that we were just a comment post away. I wrote to fill that creative void I had made since leaving theatre and acting behind. I wrote to see if I was any good at being funny or poignant. I wrote so that I didn't lay awake in bed every night with these thoughts haunting me. I wrote so that they wouldn't fill my dreams, and so I could sleep more soundly. I wrote because I enjoyed it.

All those things are still true. Mostly, I write now because I have found my new passion. I have just finished my first novel, and am freelancing for a few publications and actually getting paid. I never thought that by leaving my life passion behind in Los Angeles that I would find a new one in the United Kingdom, but I have and am so excited. Blogging helped out.

Thanks Claire for letting me spew my thoughts.