I started blogging in 1999, back when blogs were still known as weblogs and online journals and Blogger was cutting edge. It was so cutting edge I was afraid of nicking myself and thus opted to just manually update and reupload HTML pages on my personal website, wherever it was hosted. My online heroes included Christine of Maganda.org, Claire of Loobylu, and Heather of Harrumph and Jezebel (which incidentally became one of my favorite websites in the 2010s, though it was completely different from the site Heather ran). I wanted to be as creative and as good with words as they were, and thought that whatever I wrote deserved to curl up and cry in a corner when compared to what they posted.
Eventually, I found a community of fellow online journalers, and many of us made our way to Livejournal, which used to require an invite from a friend before you could join. Once I received that elusive invite, I proceeded to vomit all over my journal and most likely caused eyes to weld to the back of heads with all my drama.
Once I started working, the urge to blog tapered off, and when I wasn’t looking, blogging exploded. People were cultivating loyal readerships and making money from blogging. Soon, food blogs, travel blogs, shopping blogs, beauty blogs, parenting blogs, green blogs, gadget blogs were everywhere. I wanted to have any one of those and often regretted giving up blogging.
Trying to figure out my unique niche (ew) and worrying about being cringe have forced me to stop blogging for years. As I got older, I realized that, truly, most of the time, you’re the only one who gets in your way, and you just end up doing absolutely nothing, and life’s really just too short to keep yourself stuck. So here I go again.
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