I used to blog.
Prolifically.
I poured my heart out to my blog.
I waited for the comments to come in.
I wrote with verve and care.
I commented on my friends' blogs.
We all had blogs.
Wordpress was my platform of choice, because I was a WWW Wunderkind.
I had my own hosting on an actual server, I could customize the themes (and did, laboriously and frequently, in order to hone my craft), and perform my own maintenance.
Blogger was for the people who didn't know how to bend the web to their will -- the friends who didn't care what it looked like, or how user-unfriendly the navigation was.
Somewhere along the way, social media took over blogging.
For those of us in it for fun and not for money, quick takes and funny one-liners on facebook and instagram supplanted the urge to chronicle life in long-form windy meditations on what it meant and felt to be a person in the 21st century. Blogging became the purview of the DIYers and the food bloggers with sponsorships-- the proto-influencers who continue to fight for relevance in today's economy of likes and follows.
I was one of the last in my friendgroup to stop blogging.
As I got better at adulting, I felt pressure to become more polished, more edited in the words I put out to the world. As blogs moved from personal journal to platform, as I moved from angsty twentysomething to polished consultant, I lost my voice.
I'm reclaiming it now.
I'm choosing Blogger as my vehicle, because while Wordpress has continued to build and advance as a platform with all of the bells and whistles, Blogger feels folksy, oldschool, frozen in time. Like the last vestige of the old Geocities-infested, pre-Web-2.0 internet that first excited and inspired me to seek a career on the information superhighway.
After almost a decade away, I want to post long, windy, honest, unvarnished, quasi-anonymous thoughts and tidbits on the WWW again, where they won't appear in a feed, without caring who likes or comments on them.
Happy 2020, nonexistent audience.
