When I started blogging, my father used to tell me that it makes sense doing it if two factors are involved. First, you must have something to share. Second, you have to do it for others. Business, at that time, was not the subject of the conversation.
Regarding the first point, I never had doubts. I have always felt blessed (sometimes cursed) with a unique, holistic way of seeing the world. It was there when I was ten, it is here now that I am forty, and it will likely stay with me until I die.
Regarding the second point, my answer has always been “yes, of course!”. I share so that people can learn something new, or maybe recognise themselves in what I write.
I did not know that, over time, my answer would change.
P.S. He also told me many times that he would never write what I write, but that is another story.
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I started blogging in 2013. At that time my writing was mainly about work. I launched not one but two blogs. One was about how to pass the Italian bar exam, the other was about the music business (you can find them here and here). I was just a young copyright and entertainment lawyer, writing in Italian for an Italian audience. The purpose of my blogging was purely business related, and my writing voice was very different from what you read here now. If you ever decide to read those blogs, you will notice the difference immediately.
The second important chapter of my blogging story arrived during my second Camino de Santiago in 2016 (you can find it here).
The first time I walked the Camino, in 2015, I did it completely alone and disconnected. No posts, no photos, no trace. A few calls with my family that never knew where I was until I reached Santiago de Compostela.
The second time I wanted to do the opposite, so I decided to reverse the narrative and share everything. At that moment, most Camino blogs felt a bit self celebratory or overly sweet. The classic blog post was something like “Here is a photo of me with the hospitalero José,” followed by a romanticised description of the place. I also saw many “after-Camino” tales, sugar coated reflections after easy trips, a bit of bus stops and a cup of “vino tinto” in your hands.
I wanted a different story. I wanted to write about the roughness, the pain, the fatigue, the spiritual moments, the doubts, the choice of doing forty-kilometres-a-day for 20+ days because-I-only-have-three-weeks-of-vacation, I wanted to write about how it feels to keep pushing when your body just wants to stop. And I did it. I wrote every single evening for those twenty two damn days. I shared the hard part, the beautiful part, and the spiritual part, without filters. Looking back, it was one of the hardest experiences of my life. But It is still one of the things I am most proud of.
After that, I stopped blogging. Or at least, I stopped blogging publicly. I did not stop writing. I simply moved my words somewhere else. They went into fifteen books of poetry that I never published. They became music that I never released. They became professional articles and papers. I changed format and label, but the impulse of sharing was pretty much the same.
A few weeks after I launched Better Ipsum, the idea of blogging came back. The world had changed a lot. Now it is all videos, vlogs, TikToks, microcontent, Instagram reels. The general feeling is that if it is not short, fast and visual, it will not survive. But I still believe that if something is good, it will eventually find its way to the right person. It might take time. It might not scale. It might not go viral. Still, it will travel.
So the question came back again: Why do you blog?
Eearlier this year I was listening to an interview with Rick Rubin, someone I empathise a lot with. He said that if you want to be an artist, you must do it for yourself. It is the only way to be sincere and transparent. If you create mainly for others, the work is already altered. The filter enters too early. The result becomes something else. People can feel that, and disconnect. When I heard that, I realised something that was already in my bones but not yet in my thoughts. Yes, I care about readers. Yes, I care about clients, students, colleagues, friends. But the core of my writing happens for me.
I blog because it calms my hyperactive mind and I love the feeling of emptiness that comes after I write.
I blog because I feel proud once a piece is written. It feels like I am closing a door, and because I have a tendency to open more doors than I should, closing one is a blessing.
I blog because otherwise these ideas would ramble in my head anyway. Some blog thoughts keep circulating in my mind for ten years or more. They come back in different forms and in different contexts, but they are still there. If I do not give them a place, they start to occupy too much space.
I blog because many of my posts started as notes that stayed in my phone for years. Right now, my iPhone holds 177 different blog ideas. Some of them will be published. Some will live forever as notes. And despite my willingness of reducing that number, I feel it’ll rise in the next few months
I blog because it’s the perfect completeness of the fifth of nine “challenges of the heart” according to the Daoist way of living.
I blog because writing is one of the most honest ways I have to find myself.
I blog because, right now, it feels like the right thing to do.
That said, there is another person in this story, someone who arrives much later. Sometimes she is a student. Sometimes she is a lawyer. Sometimes she is a person that never met me and is outside of my personal and professional net. This person reads a post and feels less alone. She recognises a piece of her own story in mine. She feels seen, or at least slightly understood. She finds a small bit of her, or a gentle push to move one step forward. And I do not know who this person is, but I write for her too.
So, in the end, I do blog for myself and for others. And if I go back to my father’s question, the answer has evolved a little.
Do I have something to share? Yes.
Do I do it for others? Yes.
But I finally allow myself to add something that I could not say at the beginning.
First of all, I do it for me.
