Dear Blog

Hello. I know it's been a while. You've got questions I'm guessing. Like how do I vanish for ten years and then one day come back and pretend everything is just the same? Or, how do you know I won't vanish again? Or even, how is this relevant to my life in an age when blogs are either commercial, or dedicated to specific topics, or privately shared with only a few friends?

I don't have all the answers. That much at least hasn't changed.

I'm not going to pretend everything is the same. Ten years ago, when this was my space, I was in college. This was a place to vent, semi-anonymously, a place to tell stories, a place to hold memories. Somewhere in the last decade, I thought I didn't need this place anymore. That Facebook was enough to hold memories and that the people sharing my stories would be around forever.

The last time I wrote I had left home, many homes. And I was starting to negotiate spaces that I thought would replace those homes. I has just joined my first workplace (where I ended up for nine years, two more than JU), I had met the man I eventually got married to, and I was taking baby steps towards building a home which I thought would last forever, and getting used to the city I had moved to. It was the beginning, or so I thought, of my happily- ever- after.  Not that I ever saw myself as the princess of a fairy tale, but a sort of middle-class happily-ever-after with a reasonably successful job, a reasonably happy marriage and reasonably nice kids. Boy, did that go all wahoonie-shaped. Except the last one because them kids ain't nice they're all kinds of awesome.

And so I'm back. Because I need a space to vent, to tell my stories, and to hold my memories. Because Facebook is too public and a physical diary is too private. I'm not likely to go away this time because this is the novel of my life and novels can only end at happily-ever-after. And I am seriously done with that shit for ever. 

But no, it won't be the same as before. It can't really. The world is a different place. Google search has made it really hard to be anonymous and I don't do funny any more. I also got over the endless ellipses and the capital letter casualties. Heaven alone knows why I ever thought that was cool, but I am so eternally grateful that my readers back then, many of them much older and wiser, put up with that. I would have bitch-slapped my younger self.

A bit of rennovation seems to be called for as well. If there's one thing ten years as an editor has taught me, it's this: reading text in reverse is irritating AF.

But yeah, I'm back. Reclaiming my right to write. I'm still sort of opinionated, sort of hysterical, and all kinds of neurotic. I'm just not 24 any more. But 34 is a good place to be and since we can't grow younger, here's to aging gracefully. I'm going to be white by the time I'm forty anyway, and if the men I know who turned white young are anything to go by, old age can be smoky hot. Here's to growing old with you, dear Blog. The best is yet to be. The last of life for which the first was made...