(Why I'm writing in English)

I've been blogging, on and off, for about 7 years now. Don't know why I do it, I never took myself and these postings too seriously, but somehow sometimes I just feel the urge to write and post, like the "itching" Virginia Woolf describes in Orlando, or, as Marguerite Yourcenar says about writing, "there is, above all, a need to express oneself, that is very mysterious". Anyway, I just do it when I feel like it. And naturally I used to write in Portuguese, my mother-tongue and the one I feel most comfortable with. So why have I lately started to post in English?

The answer has to do with facebook. I never cared about having an audience, I just used to send my posts to the outer space, so to speak, and didn't think about who would read them, if anyone did. It was a somewhat liberating experience, just expressing my feelings anonymously to the outside world... But as time went by, several of my friends found out about it, and when I created a facebook account, I published the link to the blog, and later I posted a few of my blog links there. And since a good part of my facebook contacts are not Portuguese, I thought it would be better to post in English. Besides, it's a good exercise in English learning. I agree with Frederico Lourenço, when he says learning other languages widens our capacity of thinking, because there are untranslatable words for several ideas and feelings (he says so in an essay about why it's useful to learn Greek; I know no Greek - apart from a few words - but it applies to any language).

So, it's not (just) pretentiousness, my writing in English. Hope to learn something, anyway. And to make myself understood to a few people that, even if I never met them in person, came to mean a lot to me.