Ten Years

It’s the solstice tomorrow, I think, and the light stays long, a couple of days before Christmas. I didn’t sleep well last night but it’s hard to nap with the sun so high and bright.

Ten years ago I wrote the first post for this blog, or, as I would have said at the time, the first entry for this online journal. You can read it for yourself if you like, but let me tell you about it anyway: I was home in Miami for Christmas, on the island, in the house I grew up in, with my mother and my sister and my boyfriend at the time. I think all the Key Girls were married by that time but I’m trying to remember if any of them had kids yet. I don’t think they did. Were we all at at home, with our husbands or the people we wished could be our husbands? Did our moms all still live on the island? Was my sister living at home at the time?

I don’t remember. I can’t recall. I can remember the story itself, about going to the Everglades (was that actually the last time I was there, ten years ago?) and seeing the giant alligator, and being scared, and driving home from Shark Valley, but I think it’s only because I have read that post so many times—I remember what I wrote, the words, not the actual experience. That’s happened with a lot of the things I’ve written about here: the actual memories become the memory of writing the piece, which stands in for what really happened, or what I think really happened.

So much, everything, all the things, have changed since I started writing online. I I didn’t have my own computer until about 2004 and never hand-coded a site—I wonder if I would have started earlier if that had been an option for me?—and for the longest time the only thing I used the internet for was to read the personal writing of other women. That’s what I thought it was for. That’s what I thought the whole point of the internet was, and it wasn’t until years later that I learned there were some communities wherein it was bemoaned that there were no women, or that ‘blogging’ was considered by some as a very dudely thing to do. I called it online journaling then and I was always really surprised when I found a male writer online. Now what I read is usually by people I don’t know in the same way—famous people, people who get paid to do what I do, not very well or very often anymore, for free. I read a lot of news and politics and opinion and rant, and I like all that and learn a lot from it, but I would never think to email the writer and ask her or him if they want to have a coffee. I would never think, anymore, that we were doing the same thing.

Some of the writers I read back then are still writing, some aren’t, or at least not in the long-form, single-post-to-one page style that we used to before Blogger and WordPress, etc. I’m still Facebook friends with some of them, and I follow some of them on Twitter. Some I met once or twice, others I never did and probably never will. Some I became friends with and am still in touch with today.

My writing, of course, has changed too, and I have felt for a long time that that change has been for the worse. I used to update at least twice a week and think nothing of it; now I struggle to update every week or two weeks. Days just slip by and I let them go with maybe a status update or a tweet, but rarely anything longer. This has been especially true in the last year and a bit, since I moved to a neighbourhood in which I live down the street from many of my friends, and in which I have much more of a social life. It sounds so silly to say there isn’t time to write, because…who cares, right, it’s just my stupid blog, what does it matter? What kind of time does it need? But this past year and a bit I am constantly going to dinners and parties and Science Nights and to the Sunday market and band practice and movies and drinks and I don’t have the compulsion to write the same way I used to, when I’m home alone, anymore.

And part of that is that I kind of bore myself. I haven’t moved hemispheres lately, I haven’t had a baby, and I haven’t suddenly discovered a penchant for political writing, and in my experience those are the things that help a blog keep going. I don’t find my life boring but I find writing about it boring—like, how many more holiday pictures can I post, or how many more breathless hey-I’m-really-busy scribbles can I put up, or how many more introspective sort-of-thinking-about-stuff things can I write? I’m not any quieter than I was ten years—if anything, I’ve got even more to say, and at a louder volume—I’m just sort of tired of saying it.

Or maybe it’s not that I’m boring, it’s that I’m more private. About three years ago I decided to stop writing about specific dudes here, although every now and again I’ve been known to sort of reference one. I never wrote much about my family, and I still don’t. I never wrote about hard things with friends, and I still don’t, and I never will. I value my relationships with people in my flesh-and-blood world more than I value the joy of getting something exactly right, writing-wise, about pulling it together and pushing it down and bringing it around to a place that makes me sort of sigh with the pleasure of well-done work, that makes me think, “I did that thing, that was a good thing I did.” It’s a trade, as I’ve said before, that I’m willing to make, because I value other peoples’ feelings more than I value my own skills or abilities in writing. Who knows what would change if I didn’t? What could I do if I were doing it where no one could see, if there were no ramifications?

I didn’t think about that, back then. I don’t often think about it now; as I’m writing this I’ve been distracted by my text messages and my dinner and my tea towels hanging outside on the line that I should really bring in, now that the sun is finally starting to set. I keep thinking of all the clothes on the floor of my room I didn’t pick up yesterday, all the sleep I didn’t sleep last night. “Ten years,” I keep telling myself, listening to my entire musical collection in alphabetical order by song. “Ten years! Write something! Say something. Ten years! What is wrong with you?” I need to do the dishes. I need to send that text. I need to go to bed early tonight.

What I think of, watching the sun start to sneak down behind Mount Victoria, taking its sweet time, is that twenty-six year old, hunched over the old Gateway in the spare room of her childhood home, her boyfriend leaning over her and walking her through the process of setting up an online journal. “Ampersand,” she types. “It’s a long name for a short symbol.” I think she’d only just cut her hair from waist-length to shoulder length that year. She wore wire-rim glasses and clothes four sizes too big, and spent a lot of time at the university job she’d got after grad school reading other people’s—other, ordinary people—writing instead of photocopying academic journal articles or doing her data entry. I can probably do that, she thought, as she looked at the clock on her work computer—she didn’t have a cell phone yet. She was going home for Christmas in a couple of weeks and maybe she’d have the time then to get something started, maybe her boyfriend could help her. What will she write about? What will she have to say? How hard could it be, right?