The days of snatching up a free computer at City Library on Melbourne's Flinders Lane and the thrill of logging in to Blogger, a platform I was still getting my head around, feel like a very, very long time ago now. I'd spend that precious free hour of internet access, which I didn't yet have at home, writing a blog post, an update on my little world, in stream-of-consciousness style, barely pausing for breath. I'd rarely have time to reread what I'd written. I'd just reach a natural conclusion (or see I had 60 seconds left) and press "publish", then vacate the computer for the next library user.
That's what blogging - not that many people knew what it was - was like back then. Honest, in the moment, unfiltered. If you wanted to know what someone was up to, you checked their blog. Seeing your favourite blogger had a new post up was always exciting - a bit like a new episode of your favourite TV show. It was fun and a lovely way to connect with people and get to know them. I can't speak for everyone who was blogging in those early days, but I certainly had no idea of the potential reach of the words I was putting out there. The world still seemed like a very small place to me.
Blogging was a way for me to find my voice and a community of people to share it with. I was in my early twenties and had always wanted to be a writer - this seemed like the perfect opportunity to see if I could come up with the goods. Blogging was where I learned how to write non-fiction. Every day, I was taking raw material from my life - thoughts, feelings, events - and trying to make it interesting and relatable for other people, the majority of whom I had never met.
For someone who had spent most of her life struggling to let her real self out and who had always felt like a bit of an outsider, blogging was a way of feeling seen and accepted for who I was for possibly the very first time in my life, up to that point. It wasn't something I did to get noticed, it hadn't even occurred to me that anyone outside of a handful of people would even read what I had to say. It was all about connection for me. I started blogging because I liked reading blogs and wanted to be a part of it. Once I began and realised how enjoyable it was to put something out there and have people read and respond to it, it became a compulsion, a real need. I think that's how writing should feel, when it's going well and you're saying something you really want to say.
Blogging had its dark side though and I've had some very painful experiences over the years that made me frightened to ever reveal too much about myself and my life ever again. In the years since, I have yearned for that golden time when I just wrote what was on my mind and in my heart, and pressed "publish". I have longed to be able to trust people like that again. I have resisted and rallied against the unfairness of being on the receiving end of other people's insecurities. I don't think it was an accident that the nastiness I experienced online coincided with the time in my life in which I was single, after the breakdown of my first marriage. Nothing provokes speculation more than the sight of a woman enjoying herself, as Marmee March said in Little Women (published in 1868. This was 2007).
But recently, I've felt emboldened to take up the mantle again. Not to write a warts-and-all blog like I used to, but just to write more from the heart and less from fear, whether it's of missing out or the past repeating itself. To have a piece of the web that is mine, not controlled by Facebook or Mr Jobs' heirs. To have a platform that I have control over, that is not besieged by algorithms. I don't know about you but I think, despite the many advantages of social media, the extent to which it has permeated our daily lives has meant we have definitely lost something as a society. I felt like blogs, in their early days, were really contributing to a conversation, starting a movement, helping people tell their stories when they might never have done so otherwise.
Social media feels a bit like the pokies, to me. Harmless enough in small doses, for a laugh, when you've got a bit of change/time to spare. But to live on it, to lose hours and hours each day switching between these various apps, I don't know....far be it for me to question what appears to make a lot of people happy but speaking for myself, if I'm going to spend time creating content, I want to have it somewhere where I control it, where I can build my own audience rather than have an app conspire to "sell" my audience back to me, where the people following me don't even see what I post half the time unless I follow certain rules, use the right hashtags and engage at the right level. It's turning into what blogging sadly became 10 years ago - after a few years of fun and connection, it became just another damn popularity contest.
So it feels oddly appropriate that blogging has come full circle, for me at least. I thought I was done with it. I wanted to step away from that old life, that old persona, because life had moved on and so had I. I needed time out to decide what was going to come next. It was refreshing to live life for its own sake rather than through the lens of an editorial calendar. I wrote about holidays I took, food I cooked and things I was aiming towards and pondering over in my journals instead. It was nice.
But it feels equally nice to want to share again. To want to connect and have conversations with like-minded people again. I have bemoaned to my husband and friends that I still feel the need to hide some parts of myself, that I'm so afraid to really put the armour down and be vulnerable again, in case by doing so I'm inviting the nastiness of a decade ago to reoccur. And yet *not* being the real me - not talking about all the things I love and care about, everything from politics to women's rights to experimental art and music to making pickles and preserves and keeping my little garden - has felt so suffocating, and equally painful. In fact, it has started to outweigh the pain of rejection, the fear of being turned against.
I am 37 years old this year. I started blogging when I was 24. I didn't exactly 'come of age' on the internet, I am part of that generation that has straddled the old and new worlds and that can probably see most clearly the pros and cons of both. I don't exactly yearn for pre-internet days but I can't deny life was simpler then. I am concerned that we are losing/have lost something we may never get back. And, ironically, that history is most definitely repeating when it comes to politics.
But on a personal level, I am tired of the old stories and the baggage that keeps me from claiming my rightful place in the world - which is no more prominent than anyone else's, only that I am allowed to take up space and have a voice, as we all are. What I'm hoping, going forward, is that I'll finally be able to feel OK with being who I am, and no longer conceal my missteps and vulnerability in order to feel safe and to prove some people wrong. I have to integrate those painful experiences into my reality rather than keep running away from them. As Martha Beck said, if you want to avoid being hurt, you're on the wrong planet!
If I want to be seen and heard for who I really am, I have to show up in the world as who I really am. That was what blogging in 2005 and 2006 showed me. It's that spirit I'm aiming to recapture now.
If I wanted something bright and shiny with styled pictures and lots of nice products, I'd just buy a magazine. I come to blogs to find out about how people are really living their lives. What means something to them. What makes them feel happy. How they deal with the less happy days. Where they might have the balls to talk about things most of us are thinking but too scared to say out loud, and thereby we can all feel a little less alone. The blogs that have moved me over the years and that I still read now are not the ones that showcase an aspirational life, but ones that invite me into someone's real life and motivate me to take a closer look at my own.
So, despite 'blogging is dead' being an oft-repeated phrase online, I don't think so. What got me started and what has now brought me back is the desire to connect. I think, as human beings, we will always need that.
