A Place of My Own
The other day, I remembered I used to have a personal blog. I haven’t thought about it in years. I don’t even remember the name, but I know that it was 2008-ish, and that it was hosted on Blogger, because … well, I have no idea why. Free and easy, probably.
It was a creative outlet, though I don’t think I identified it as such at the time. I was working 10+ hour days from a gray cubicle, with the kind of commute that takes 60+ minutes to go 11 miles.
But still, when you’re 25, you’re not thinking in terms of feeding your soul, or the fact that our life is comprised of a very finite number of minutes, and you’re spending too many of them in a conference room or staring at a computer that you don’t even own.
I remember only that this little blog felt free in a way that positing to Facebook did not. A place to be honest. A place to be weird. A place to be me, but also, contradictorily, a little anonymous.
A place where it never occurred to me to measure the value of my contribution to the world in likes or comments.
I’m about the same age as Mark Zuckerberg, which means when he started Facebook in college, I too was in college. At the time, an .edu email address was required for a Facebook account, and I had one of those. I signed up, and …
Well, quite honestly, I don’t really remember using Facebook much in college, or having much of an opinion on it. So when I graduated from college, I also graduated from Facebook, and closed my account, and thought, “Well that’s that.”
But, of course, you know what happened. Facebook swapped exclusivity in favor of world domination.
So a few years after I closed my .edu account, I rejoined Facebook as an “adult,” because, well, everyone was doing it. The change in the platform from my college days was pronounced and a little menacing. The Facebook I knew in college had felt largely benign. This was a different force entirely. It was shiny. It was popular. It was ….
A great way to keep track of birthdays.
But it also felt a bit like noisy quicksand. You kind of wanted to get away from it to remember what your own thoughts felt like, but you couldn’t quite make yourself hit that x to close your browser window. (This was Blackberry’s era, my friends. No app stores yet.)
Facebook was a place where everything mattered, and also, somehow, nothing did.
I wasn’t yet brave enough to get out, but I did seek an outlet. I believe that humans are meant to express themselves, but that we’re not all meant to express ourselves in the same way.
While Facebook felt as creatively inspiring as my cubicle (I didn’t exactly stay up late at night daydreaming the possibilities for my avatar that was exactly the same dimensions as everyone else’s avatar), my blog, was, well … mine.
(Sort of. The open source crusade would be quick to remind me that Blogger is owned by Google ).
But still, for all intents and purposes, it was my place to tell my stories, and arrange them how I wanted, and choose my own colors, my own fonts, my own layout. A place where I first my first shaky steps in tinkering with HTML.
A place where I was never once tempted to check comments or likes or site traffic, because it wasn’t about reception, or even connection, it was about creation. It was about the things that I liked, the things I did, the thoughts that I had, all put out into the world in a messy, personalized jumble untainted by Facebook blue, unconstrained by a mere top to bottom scroll.
I haven’t thought about that little blog in a long time. To be fair, I haven’t thought about Facebook in a long time either. I left in 2009.
But recently I’ve found myself in a “blow it all up and start over” phase of my life, and as I’ve been trying to figure out the shape of the new thing, I thought about that little blog.
I remembered what it felt like to have a place on the internet that was mine, far from frenzied, TikTok, angry Twitter, desperate Instagram, and even the uneasy feeling that something’s not quite right about Substack.
I’ve been hearing for years that social media killed blogging, but if that’s true, why am I thinking about a little blog I started sixteen years go?
And why am I obsessed with this and this and this?
I began to crave a place of my own, so I made one. A place where I’m free to be creative. Free to be weird. Free to be me.
Welcome.
