it's hlog's birthday !
a year ago!!!! i started this blog to mostly find a place to post photos of A and my honeymoon and keep my sister's updated on my life. in that time it's evolved to be much more than that and today I got a publication acceptance for one of my essays, my first published work that is not a poem !
in my life, i have had many places where I've kept record of my thoughts and feelings, but none so official or curated as this blog.
My first blog was a cyworld page (of all things!). where I had a little digital avatar and dressed her up in digital clothes. I think my mini homepage song was something by Fly to the Sky. I don't remember much about this era other than that it existed. I wish I could find it now, but I don't even think the site exists.
I had a Xanga. I ALSO don't remember much about this (so much so that in fact that i didn't remember it existing until about an hour ago when I was trying to recover my old MySpace page). Now that I have been reminded...I remember very much liking it and enjoying my time on there. I vaguely remember someone in middle school telling me Xanga was no longer cool. and of course i believed her.
So i ended up on MySpace. Which, upon reflection was definitely not the safest place for a tween on the web. I remember my profile picture was an anime girl with cat ears--but I mostly liked the exact shade of purple that her dress was. And I thought the drawing was so cute. I did try to get back into my old account (unsuccessfully), but I was able to log in to my old email account and i actually almost gagged reading some of the emails i sent in middle school. everyone left myspace for facebook in high school and also of course....
tumblr. like all the moody teenagers did in that era. i definitely can still access that account and even used it a bit in college. i reblogged a lot of arsenal (soccer), and parks and rec gifs, and artsy photos i didn't take. I was at one point on the sherlock side of tumblr. as well as the doctor who side of tumblr. superwholock? unfortunately not, because i never got into supernatural. i left tumblr bc my roommate started sub-tweeting? sub-blogging? about me on her blog (which, to be fair, is her right) on her tumblr.
for a while in grad school i had a food instagram account. which i mostly used as a kind of blog to write down my thoughts on food. i got rid of it because i felt like the food instagram game is so saturated with people who are mostly interested in showing off. and also people who don't know what they're talking about.
anyways, this is all to say, putting bits of your brain on the internet can be a strange and beautiful and cringe-y thing. i feel this way about poems i've written from even two years ago (though perhaps not to the same extent as i feel about emails i wrote almost 15 years ago). will i stand by my thoughts on kim yuna or prose or what i did in 2025 in two years? will i stand by it in fifteen? almost certainly not. and I think if i did it would alarm me even more because it would mean i have not grown. i met one of my good friends thanks to that blog though, and i don't know that i would have survived living in charlottesville without it.
despite what they say, i don't think the internet really is forever. if it were, i would be able to see my cyworld page from when i was in 5th grade. but for now, in this thirty first year of my life, this corner of the internet is where i'm taking notes, sharing photos, writing it all down. so thanks for reading and laughing and crying and thinking with me this year!