Blogging was my first real introduction to the internet. I had a bunch of different diaries on a bunch of different sites, sometimes posting multiple times per day. When OpenDiary, the place that hosted my first and longest-sustained blog, finally shut down, I downloaded the whole thing into a Notepad doc that now sits on an old hard drive somewhere in the house. Twelve years, and over a million words. I was sixteen when I started it, so obviously most of that million is borderline unreadable now, but it means something to me to have it still.
I still write a diary every day (or as close to every day as circumstances allow), but it's a very different kind of writing. My ADHD brain struggles to get to the end of one thought before branching off into seventeen others and tying itself in a knot, and historically that's been crippling for me. I start to think about going into the kitchen to load the dishwasher and tune back in four hours later to find myself still sitting on the sofa thinking about the horror of spontaneous combustion. It's rubbish, and it makes it really hard to get things done. But if I write down "I am going to the kitchen now to load the dishwasher", the thought is allowed to exist by itself long enough for me to actually go into the kitchen and do the thing. Keeping a diary where I actively narrate all the mundane daily shit I need to do has made a huge difference to my life, and I want to carry on doing it, but at the same time it feels like wasted words. I start a new Word doc for it at the start of every year, and at the end of the year I just delete it. Anything of value I might occasionally write there is buried so deeply in lists of daily tasks that searching back for it becomes an insurmountable chore and makes me annoyed with myself for being so tedious.
Some people would probably judge me for saying that I like to go back and reread things I've written, but I think there's value in reflecting on one's own thoughts and one's own work, and in being able to appreciate it. Openly stating that you enjoy something you created yourself (as an end product, rather than just the process) and that you believe it to be good is often considered poor form, which is deeply stupid. Throughout almost forty years of regular self-esteem crises the one thing I've never questioned is the fact that I write well, and when I can't do it - particularly, when I can't create things I might enjoy reading again - everything else in my life suffers.
If nobody reads this, it doesn't really matter, though it's also critically important that I not be afraid of people reading this. I've written tens of thousands of words of fiction over the past couple of years, stories I really want to tell, and I keep it all to myself because I feel too insecure, too fragile. I've been too afraid to share for too long, and I know it's making it harder and harder to keep writing. At some point, it all starts to feel like wasted words. So I'm starting small, with a low-stakes personal blog where there's no real pressure to impress. I'll just write things and hit publish, putting them out there into the world where they may or may not be seen.
My plan is to write very regularly, at least to begin with, so I don't just forget about it entirely. I have a bunch of blogs tied to this account, some public and some not, and when I came here to start this one I was reminded that three years ago I'd had a Really Good Idea, started a new blog for it, written a couple of draft posts, and then blanked the whole thing out of my mind before I got round to posting anything at all. I'd rather not end up with even more of a weird blog graveyard than I already have.
Writing. I like it. I want to remember that.
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