Blogging - Chicken Soup for my Soul

I am 12 years old.
I am huddled under my bedcovers and feeling sorry for myself. I am not going to school today because I am sick. Normally at this age, I should be over the moon, the thought of skipping school providing an instant antidote. But it doesn’t this time because I really do feel unwell, not just a made up stomach ache as a ploy to skive off school.

I hear my mum’s footsteps – plod, plod, plod – coming up the stairs. She nudges my bedroom door open and my eyes light up as I see a steaming bowl of something balanced on the tray she is carrying. She puts it down gingerly on my side table and I take a look at the steaming liquid. Its chicken noodle soup!! My all time favourite comfort food. I lap up spoon after spoon with gusto. Haaa, life never felt so good. No school. In bed. With a bowl of steaming hot chicken noodle soup. Homemade with love. I couldn’t ask for more.

Fast forward 24 years.
I am feeling overwhelmed so many thoughts swirling around in my head. What to do, what to do. I shuffle into the room I call my office. I sit and contemplate my PC. I boot up – beep, the Windows theme tune plays – I click the explorer icon and I am ready to go. I swear I can feel the thump, thump of my heart as it beats in excitement within my chest. Why am I so excited? Easy. I am about to blog. Fingers begin to fly across my keyboard. Clack, clack,clack. I begin to feel so much better. Magic.

Blogging does something for me, just like chicken soup did something for me eons ago. It transports me to a place I haven’t quite found a word for yet and somehow, I feel I should know what that word ought to be. I get lost when I blog. It soothes, it comforts, it releases and most important of all, it allows me to make contact. And from one day to the next, I never know with whom. I cannot deny, and I am sure this goes for many of my fellow bloggers, the pleasure I feel when I look at the comments link and see I have ONE COMMENT! Oh the joy (and a little bit of vanity thrown in, come on now, admit it). Someone actually read my stuff and thought it was worth commenting on. I don’t care if it is a positive comment or not. Just the mere fact that what I had to say connected with somebody in some way is enough for me and it keeps me going. It is the fuel I need to continue on this blogging journey that I have begun.

I have made many friends here in blogosphere. Some I may never meet, others I may meet someday, who knows. These are people who give me something through their blogs just as I, hopefully, give them something through mine. Every time I log on there is this anticipation that I am going to hook up with an old friend or two. I almost think that it is my right to expect to hear from them everyday and sometimes I am very disappointed when I check out their blogs and they haven’t blogged today. What, I cry in indignation, you mean so and so didn’t blog today! How dare s/he keep me waiting like this? What’s happening? Where has s/he gone? You mean s/he has something better to do????????? I laugh, what an addiction this has become. But one I love.

The gift of reading other peoples blogs is a privilege for me because here they are, opening up their world to me - the way they view the world, sometimes radically different from the way I do and sometimes almost identical, see people, feel about people, sharing their hopes and dreams, expectations and bitter disappointments. Ready to put their beliefs on the line and be cyber lynched for them. Not an easy thing to do.

Ah, what a world I have discovered in these few short months that I have kept this blog. I have seen another side to people, and yes Nigerians, I never knew existed. In the world of blogging you are free to dispense with your inhibitions, moreso if you chose to remain anonymous. I don’t find this cowardly at all, I find it simply gives.me.more.freedom. Anonymity may not work for everyone but it works for me.

So thank you, my blogofriends, for being there, for noticing, for giving. Keep the chicken soup coming.