Why are we here?

So, as promised, here it is. The "why do I do this" post. I've been thinking about this for a while. When I visited my parents not so long ago, I was talking about this site with my Mum. She's incredulous that I would put something like this in the public domain and said that she could never read it - that it would feel like an invasion of privacy. Various people have been disappearing and reappearing or thinking about it for various reasons in the blog-sphere recently, leaving me thinking again about why I'm writing this. ( What do I get out of it? )