Maybe on a Sunday night

In an ambitious bout of time-wasting a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that the earliest blog post I have still published online is dated the 31st of July, 2001. Ten years later, and it's still floating along quietly in the ether, tethered to the surprisingly enduring buoy that is Live Journal. Rifling through those early posts felt a little like sitting on the living room couch as your mother goes through the greatest hits collection of your family album, regaling your senior prom date with every nugget of mortification you thought long buried in the annals of your personal history. Except in this case, it's not your mother playing the role of proverbial humiliator, but your younger, idiot self.

But looking deeper at the questionable formatting, the predictably angsty teenage impudence, and the sheer dullness of most entries, I was struck by the complete absence of anything resembling a writer's bone in those halcyon entries. There wasn't any sort of voice there, at all. Which is embarrassing. In fact, I hesitated even linking to it because I'm terrified I just look really, really dumb.

Fast forwarding ahead a few months, I expected to see some sort of growth, some hint of at least attempting the artful task I am enamored with now. But, save a brief period where I posted probably the first short story I ever wrote outside of a classroom assignment, there wasn't anything to indicate that I showed promise in, or even enjoyed, writing. I eventually migrated away from Live Journal to Xanga, and in jumping formats, I finally started to see a few embers. But for someone who's always considered myself fairly interested in writing, it was bizarre to see no evidence of it in the one outlet where I was, for the most part, doing it purely for myself. I guess I was bugged by the question of when it actually happened then, that I stopped simply typing and actually started to write.

Historically, my posts have been far too erratic and inconsistent to yield any empirical data to chart this, but it does leave me wondering now, ten years later, how much exactly I've grown (if at all). I've never been able to quite capture the ability to write in a personal journal format, commonly finding myself at a loss whenever it comes to recounting my daily paces, or expounding on some minor thought. I find it just as hard now to write about myself as I did back then, except where youthful enthusiasm/vanity once pushed me to at least put something down, the older, more jaded vanity of my current self abandons the act altogether. I'm trying to change that now, with this incarnation of the blog.

I first attempted this when I moved to New York, registering a brand new username with blogger and making a grand total of one post which, excluding the title, amounted to five words (which was actually a misquoted line from an early Aughts pop song, no less). The blog sat dormant for a year before, deciding to give the ol' girl one more try, I got back in the saddle. I discovered that the original username that I had wanted on blogger but which had already been registered was, in fact, registered to me. 14-year old me, actually. Through some finagling and internet CSI-ing, I regained access and reclaimed the blog, archiving away the old posts to start carte blanche, this new era of actually writing. And though those posts technically predate that July 31st, 2001 Live Journal post, we'll cheat a little for the sake of this particular entry's theme.

For someone who can be as statistically obsessed as I am (come on, I know there are at least a few people out there who wonder about average and lifetime durations spent on the can, who fantasize about pie charts and bar graphs comparing personal consumption ratios of different brands of cereal, and other such trivial life box scores), it's been both fascinating and frustrating, trying to determine the line graph that represents my writing habit. But maybe the point isn't to keep looking back at what I have or haven't done, how far or short I've actually come, and to simply focus on just moving forward. Statistics don't tell the full story, and instead can give weight and significance to irrelevant tangibles while completely missing the essence of the statisticized. Besides, if you looked at my past at-bats, there'd be an alarming trend of, well, quitting.

The tricky thing about writing in this forum is that there's always an effort, conscious or not, to cater to a hypothetical audience. It's tough to stay honest in the face of something so daunting. That's the key issue I've struggled with in writing in a blog. I've always assumed the diary-esque nature of a blog meant there was an openness that was required in the writing, yet there has always been a guarded nature to how I approach blogging, specifically because I was aware any mook with a Net Zero account and a dial-up modem could access what was supposed to be kind of personal. This discord is what always inevitably killed any aspirations I had to keep writing, because I didn't want to be dishonest, but neither did I want to invite that kind of vulnerability. But what I've finally started to figure out is that writing, as with any art, needs an audience, whether the artist is thrilled about it or not. Otherwise, what's the point? The risk is, and has always been, exposing some fragment of the soul, and giving up to avoid having to filter or temper my thoughts isn't some noble attempt to avoid dishonesty; it's cowardice.

So maybe that's all I've learned in ten years of putting my writing up to a limited and probably partially imagined audience: the growth isn't just in the amount of ink spilled or witty phrases turned, but in the willingness to look dumb and be mortified, and still keep writing.

So even if I just high-dived face first into a pool full of pie (which, now that I'm picturing it, actually sounds kind of awesome), at least I can promise myself that there'll be another post after this. And another after that.

And another, and another.

(And yes, there's an unsubscribe button for a reason)