4 years ago today I was gearing up to write my first blog post of ever.
I had recently discovered just how incredibly connected you could feel to someone through her blog.
She Just Walks Around With It was my first. I didn’t actually know her for real, but she was a friend of a friend sort of person and lived in SF. And I loved her. Still do. (Incredibly, Kristy went from being single in the city, to thoroughly boyfriended, to married, to mommy x 2 in the time that I have been reading.)
She included Dooce.com on her blog roll and woah nelly. I fell hard for Heather Armstrong. So funny. Such a good writer. Snarky and fiesty and tall and pretty. And man, the tales she could tell! I had no idea of the rabbit hole I was falling down when I started delving into the archives back to the beginning so I could read her blog in its entirety.
It was under the influence of those two that I started a blog under the impression that I could just tell whatever stories I wanted to tell. I didn’t know that you were supposed to have a niche to have a good blog. And at the time, I wasn’t really worried about having a “good” blog. All I wanted to write about was how mad and sad and broken apart I was as I suffered through the tumults of a terrible relationship.
I might as well have just been writing an angsty emo diary, but in a secret, dark and squirrelly way, I wanted him to know just how profoundly and poetically he was alternately making me woozy with love and lost in despair. Writing a public blog was a way that I could pretend that he might read what I’d written and that it would burn his mitochondria with shame and remorse. But I kept the blog pretty hidden and he never saw it. As far as I know, anyway.
After a time, I stopped lapsing into the self destructive behavior of seeing this man. Not so very much later, I met the David and I didn’t feel so very mad or sad any more. The things I wrote about changed. I wanted to write without the commitment of having to write a whole thing. I liked the idea of writing something just a little, instead of trying and failing to write something big. Although as easy as writing little things seemed it would have been, there were still long chunks of time in which I wrote nothing at all.
I have turned almost all of the posts that talked about the so very sad and heartbroken times to private. They never really were for public consumption. But sometimes I read them just to remind myself of that person that I was.
And I’m glad now that even if I don’t have weeping and melodrama, there still quite a few days that I still something to write about.
margaret edith 