4 years ago today…

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.