Why blog?

Now that blogging is trendy, people seem to care a lot about what & how they write. Its as if there is an invisible contest to see who can be most reflective & deep while sounding both educated & poetic. I started a blog about this time last year because I figure I could write like that. I have deep revelations sometimes. And I figured that even if I couldn't come up with an originally beautiful thought, I could put in a good quote and still have a nice post.
This worked for a while, but then it felt as though it was missing something. Besides, it takes time to craft every word together well enough to stay in the "contest". There is tough competition out there!
I eventually forgot about my desire to blog at all. The desire would resurface occasionally, but I would remember the missing piece I felt, and therefore not return to blogging.
Then one day I realized why I didn't like blogging - I felt that there was discontinuity between who I was when I wrote posts and who I was in real life. The blog was only a small portion of who I was. I felt as though I was living out a piece of me in writing that I didn't show very often in day-to-day life. I think blogs and social media in general has created a place where people can be different than who they typically are. Sometimes this can be good (for example feeling the freedom to fully express ones creativity through writing, photography, cooking, etc...) or negative (creating a second identity,bullying, spreading rumors, internet affairs,  etc...) I had begun blogging for the former reason, but I became sucked into the latter reason. I could hide the "bad", confusing, challenging pieces of life in my writing and focus only on the "good" impressive stuff.
(Disclaimer: I am not saying all blogs are missing something or trying to compete in this invisible "contest" I mentioned earlier. There are a lot of very talented, genuine, honest people out there who aren't hiding anything. Maybe one day I will be like them. And then maybe one day I will have a public blog!)
So here I am once again writing in a blog. It is good for me to have a place to put some thoughts. In an effort to prevent a false self, I'm not going to share this space yet. Maybe down the road, but not yet. First I need to discover more of what it means to be me.