Blogging as catharsis

In the course of reading about the sad and puzzling life of Aaron Schwartz, the computer programming wunderkind who hanged himself Jan. 11, I’m struck by how poetic and intensely personal his blog posts were. As a New Yorker article explains, he wrote things in his blog that he wouldn’t say to anyone in person, not even his friends. His writing is direct, concise and at times heartbreakingly intimate.

Part travelogue, part confessional, Schwartz’s writing spans everything from movies to air-travel complaints to the meaning of life. In one post he muses about the nature of evil. In another, he laments life in suburbia. In most of his writing, even the seemingly mundane posts, you catch a glimpse of a man who’s smart, funny and thoughtful — but sad and isolated, too. Few of his posts are about himself but most of the reveal a complex inner dialog and rich inner life.

I wish I could say the same about my blogging. Baring your soul so freely, or even part of it, takes real guts. That’s courage that I haven’t been able to muster in the decade-and-a-half I’ve been blogging.

Maybe someday.

P.S. After thinking further about this topic, it dawned on me that one of the reasons Swartz’s writing seems so transparent is that he thought, incorrectly, that he was writing more or less anonymously. Though he didn’t hide his identity on the blog, it somehow rarely occurred to him that his friends were actually reading it. One story — and for the life of me, I can’t remember where I read this (edit: it was Rolling Stone) — recounts a time he was being introduced to speak at an event. The person introducing him mentioned an embarrassing personal story Swartz had detailed on the blog. Swartz was mortified that the story had gotten out, even though he had published it himself.

The incident makes me wonder whether I should create an anonymous blog for my most personal thoughts. Why not just get a private diary? I don’t know. Physical diaries are too easy to find and too tempting for other people to read; and if someone finds it, it’s obvious who those thoughts belong to. Posting online offers a degree of separation. Blogs are almost transient, existing in a digital etherworld. At the same time, knowing that some stranger somewhere might be reading it might make me more disciplined about the writing style. Too exhibitionist? Paradoxically, opening up to people I’ll never meet seems more private than, say, posting the same things to a close circle of friends on Facebook. It’s like the anonymity of a big city vs. the suffocating familiarity of a small towns.