Why You Should Start a Blog

 Asmi Aggarwal

The first time I tried to keep a journal was in the third grade. For Christmas, my babysitter gave me a bright pink scrapbook with the word “love” inscribed inside a rainbow heart on its cover, and I filled its pages every day for about half a year. I wrote about the latest school drama, my weekend plans, complaints against my younger brother and everything else under the sun. Then, one day, I stopped.

In middle school, during COVID and my angsty tween era, I tried again. I loved putting my thoughts somewhere outside my head, but I was never consistent. Even though I was the only one who would ever see my entries, I sometimes felt embarrassed by them. Writing down my thoughts made them feel too real.

Then, in junior year, I stumbled across a random girl on TikTok raving about a strange app called Substack. Looking for a distraction from midterms, I downloaded it. I had no idea what I was doing, but I made an account, called my blog Beneath the Cherry Tree (shameless self-plug) and started writing.

Somehow, it became something I looked forward to rather than something I kept abandoning. I began publishing poems, essays, random notes and whatever else I felt like writing. I was also much more open than I had ever been in my private journals. Which is strange, because now, technically, other people can actually read what I write.

But I think that’s part of what makes it work. I’m not forcing myself to write for an audience; I’ve simply stopped caring about who sees my posts. Beneath the Cherry Tree feels like my own little corner of the internet: a place where I can be serious, silly, sentimental or completely nonsensical without having to explain myself. Blogging has helped me move beyond the idea that I have to journal for the sake of my mental health and discover that writing could be something I genuinely enjoyed.

In the 2000s, blogs were everywhere. People wrote about their lives, interests, opinions and latest obsessions. The internet seemed less concerned with performance and more interested in just allowing people to exist. You could follow someone because you liked the way they thought, not because they were the most aesthetic person ever (well, maybe that did play a small part).

Today, so much of what we consume is designed to be scrolled past. We spend hours perusing Instagram reels and looking at other people’s lives, but comparatively little time making something of our own. A blog offers a different kind of participation: active thought.

And I think that is part of why the recent popularity of “girlblogging” is so interesting. The term has become a recognizable internet aesthetic: “whimsy,” nostalgic and often accompanied by carefully curated images, literary references and a specific kind of femininity. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, I LOVE myself a cute girlblog. But sometimes, the more a trend is packaged as a way to be unique, the less unique it really becomes.

So, instead of just calling yourself a girlblogger, why not actually make a girl blog? Make it pink or blue or covered in pictures of things you love. Write about your favorite books, your worst days, your latest obsession or something you’ve been thinking about for weeks. You can make it beautiful, but you can also make it strange. You can be “whimsy” without coming across as performative (I know you have it in you!).

That, to me, is what makes blogging so much more interesting than mindlessly consuming content. You are making something that could not have existed without you. I think that’s a pretty good reason to start!