Motivation: Blogging and Memories

They say out of every hundred people, only one knows how to motivate themselves and sustain that motivation. Call it self-motivation, although that word's technically wrong because no really makes you do whatever it is you're doing, or call it intrinsic motivation-- that good feeling of satisfaction, sense of control and that sense of being-ness one gets from an action. As much as I'd like to be one of those, I'd be the first one to admit I'm not. That is why at work, I need encouragement, assurance and the occasional acknowledgment to be able to excel, or even to simply slug it through when work becomes boring and repetitive. I'm someone who needs extrinsic motivation.

It is in this vein that I've pondered about this shrine that insists on my so-called existence in cyberspace. Now that a month have passed by, I can say I have certainly expanded my knowledge in the technical aspects of making an online journal. However, like work, it has become a bit of a burden. What should I write about and how to write it has become a headache. And like work, I need to have something that should motivate me to keep on blogging.

I thought about it and have only succeeded in making my headache worse. Then it suddenly hit me. The reason for this was because I was expecting an audience, when in fact, there was none. I guess I was too caught up in generating traffic, which shouldn't have been the case because this is after all a personal blog. As much as I like to make my life interesting, it really isn't. And what I have to write here only registers to those who know me and have interacted with me in real life.

I thought back to remember the reason I started to blog in the first place. I remembered I did it because I wanted to write. In writing one gets to fully internalize the experience- to look at it from different perspectives, to justify things after the initial rashness of the action has gone, to delineate what are blurry and hazy, and more importantly to immortalize it; to keep the memory after a few minutes, a few days, or even years had passed.

Truthfully, I have gotten bored from blogging. Like I said, I'm someone who need extrinsic motivation and I do get pretty lost when left on my own. However, this won't stop me blogging with the motivation that someday, I may need these old memories to know who I am, to feel better about myself and the future, when the recent ones will fail me.

image from here