Blog for health!

Is blogging the new black?! I only ask because the fabulous DUC's (the Uke band) also have a blog http://theduc.blogspot.com/ and some of my most interesting friends have one as well... in fact to be fair, were it not for these interesting friends yours truly would have no readers! So what is it that drives us to document our lives, or at least the parts of our lives that we think are interesting? Victorian women were encouraged to keep diaries to keep them emotionally stable - get rid of all that hysteria in the written word and keep it hidden away from a society that frowned on public displays of emotion and affection. And while the sentiment is misogynistic bullshit, there is strong evidence that people that write, or express themselves in other artistic forms feel much healthier for doing so.
So is that what we are doing? Are we bloggers emotionally more healthy because we confess to what's bothering us and celebrate our achievements... even if that is as mundane as finally remembering to pick up the dry cleaning?
I know why I started mine; to record what happens in the garden and to talk about my dog. Who lest we forget is a rescue dog that was very badly treated and needed to be rehabilitated. Square that image with the friendly, loving, cheeky animal you met at the party. (And that in itself is one of life's more interesting questions: why do the animals, and indeed the humans, who have been treated badly, often turn out to brave and loving and fair?)
But this blog has become unquestionably more than just a log book. You find you begin to record the minutiae of your day which previous you would have filed away, dismissed or forgotten. All of a sudden, you have raised it to such a level that you are sharing with strangers and friends that you picked up your dry cleaning today. Why?!
A friend overseas who reads my blog says she hears my voice when she reads the blog and feels she is still part of our lives. Which is wonderful, because she's wonderful. A friend who lives in London and whom we see often says exactly the same, it allows him to be closer to his friends and he finds it funny the things people get up to, because he gets up to exactly the same things...
Maya Angelou was right, "we are more alike than we are unalike".
Is blogging is the new reality TV? I don't watch reality shows not because I'm a snob, but because if I was that interested in car crashes I would have become a fire fighter. The more unstable you are, the more likely it is that you're going to get your shot at fame. And I find that uncomfortable and I question where as society we are going with this obsession with watching strangers strip their lives bare sometimes at real pyscholgical and emotional cost that will last long after the cameras stop rolling. And we are surely all familiar with the extreme reactions to the TV talk show confessional - the guy who shot his neighbour because his neighbour was a man and he said he fancied him live on air? The man who held his own daughter as hostage because she had gone on a talkshow and admitted he had been abusing her since she was a small child, and even now, as a young woman? Extreme examples maybe, but real ones nonetheless. Are we so used to people talking now, that we have forgotten how to listen? How many people did that young woman tell that she was being abused, how many people didn't hear her, and so more vulnerable than most of us can ever imagine, she went on an American talkshow and told the world. We don't see what's happening in our own lives, what's happening under our own noses, but we can tell you what's happening in Big Brother and why it's happening (because we're all cod psychologists now, you know).
Maybe blogging as genuinely interesting and fun as it is, is a way of hearing our own voices. Documenting our own achievements and sharing with friends the things that matter to us - even if they seem small. And maybe by reading each other's blogs, in an abstract way I grant you, we are looking out for each other and acknowledging how important those voices are.
Like I said, we're all cod psychologists now...

Pluto's tummy is still bad. He was better last night when he tried to kill the hoover (the hoover is the dragon, he is George, everyone loves role play...) but today he is listless and his stomach is making extraordinary noises. I may have to take him to the vet tomorrow...