1. Allowed me to improve my writing skills in English.
2. Got me to forget about the horror of a blank page. Before I started blogging, it took me forever to begin writing a new piece. Now I just sit down and write. Writing has become second nature.
3. Introduced me to many extremely intelligent, cool, and fun people. Every time I read the new comments to my posts, my faith in humanity is restored.
4. Allowed me to meet fantastic colleagues in my field and other academic fields. I now feel a lot less isolated professionally and intellectually.
5. Helped me to reduce my blood pressure dramatically.
6. Provided company and a great support network. Now wherever I go, I always have my readers and fellow bloggers accompanying me. It’s like always having a group of friends in your pocket. (I mostly read and answer comments on my BlackBerry.)
7. Taught me that sharing my experiences with people can be very liberating.
8. Gave me a new identity as a blogger. And it’s now one of my favorite identities.
9. Banished boredom from my life for good.
10. Helped me generate many important insights. You never know where you will arrive when you start thinking or arguing about any topic.
And what has blogging (either your own or that of others) done for you?
Clarissa's Blog 
I’ve pretty much abandoned blogging, except for reworking some of my old writings and putting up pretty pictures or pretty videos. I’m wholly on Facebook now. It has proven to be a great networking tool, especially with regard to women’s issues in Zimbabwe and general Zimbabwean or African issues. Facebook has the benefit of allowing you to screen people, so that you can form circles around you for various levels of engagement. I’m someone is irritating me, (which almost always means they are ineducable, nothing more, nothing less), I can ban them without having to justify my decision to anyone but myself.
I think this capacity to ban irritating people is wonderful, because it’s how life ought to be. So many times, people engaging on blogs (at least in the past, up until 2008-9) have not understood that their behaviour was antisocial. They used emotional blackmail techniques, quoting “freedom of speech” to persist where their attitudes and views were not wanted.
Nowadays, it is much more easy to enforce some kind of social structure. People who think its cool and acceptable to relate in the manner of teasing or preaching will find that they have access to a whole realm of people to treat in that way — but no access to me. They have placed themselves in the outer circle, or cause me to “disappear” them.
For those who uphold an ideology of Darwinism or social Darwinism, I think this structure (facilitated by Facebook) replicates its processes much more closely than the “freedom of speech” or emotional blackmail of the past.
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I love blogging, too. Before blogging I would just journal and that lost its meaning, because I was only writing to myself. Blogging allows me to find my voice and fine-tune my English skills, too. That, and I feel like I am doing something important and I like it because my blog is MY blog. I absolutely love it. There is nothing in this world that would stop me from blogging.
Thank you for writing this.
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Help me re-find voice is what it was intended to do, and did. I also found answers to a lot of questions I had in general, on blog threads / in blog conversations, lots of insights from various people, including Clarissa, Jennifer, others.
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