Belonging and writing in english
I first posted this on another blog, Meander, that I since deleted. I just thought about it and wanted to give it a home again, so now it lives here.
I thought about selling this to myself as practicing writing in english. And writing in english really isn’t as easy for me as it should be, considering most content I cons00me is in english and I had thousands of english classes in school and university. Maybe easy is the wrong word. It doesn’t feel as natural as writing in german, words don’t come to me as quickly, I have to think more about grammar and even more about Rechtschreibung (but spelling isn’t my strong suit in german either) …
Just remembered this post that basically says that blogposts are queries to find interesting people and realized its about something else entirely. I know that in german I write about weird and esoteric (not in the horoscope-sense but in the sense of not exoteric) things, about social-systems-theory and post- (or meta?) modernism … but I feel like writing in german I’m even less likely to find anyone (except some people from uni) interested in my writing.
I write a blog because I want my writing to be read.1 I want people to react to my writing, to not feel like screaming into the void, I want my writing to make a difference. I still remember the feeling when I first got some reactions to a tweet, the high of knowing that people read what I wrote. But then saying that my posts are a search for interesting people ins’t really honest. It’s not only about finding interesting people, it’s also about finding interested people. It’s about finding community, about wanting to belong.
Thats why I’m starting to write in english. To belong. But that won’t be the only change from my german blogposts. I want to try and follow the advice of imperfect to work faster, write shorter posts and try more things. I want to write more intimate, less constructed texts and I want to be more honest. Also, I’m going to start writing e-mails to people whose blogs I’m interested in. Community doesn’t build itself.