Is This Thing On?

Hello, internet! 

Wow.

I'm gonna be real, I haven't written an honest to god blog post since like... high school? Lord... it's been so many years, I can't even remember. I've been so invested in poetry for at least a decade... I think some part of me believed that I had "grown out" of blogging. That it was juvenile somehow.

I think I was probably confusing the content with the format. 

Man, I desperately wanted to put an emoji after that last sentence... this is gonna be an adjustment. 

But here we are! Welcome!! I don't know what I'm doing! But like, no one does!! It's the human condition! 
One of the things I promised myself about starting this blog was that I would *try* to *attempt* to *make an effort* to embrace imperfection. Not my forte. But I want this to be as personal and informal as possible. I think one of the writing traps I've fallen into over the years has been performing. Always writing to an audience. Always imagining who might be reading my poetry, my stories - hell, even my journal entries. That's wild.

It is absolutely outside of my comfort zone to look at this blog post and see how long it already is, to wonder what the hell I've even said so far?? Like? To attempt to write this without imagining someone reading and judging it?? (I'm still totally doing it, by the way.) 

But you know what, we're learning and we're growing. Every moment of every day.

So here we are. 

Quarantine.

What a time to be alive.

Honestly, I'm here because my therapist suggested it. Insert "no one is surprised" joke here. Therapy is sort of my thing... the muscle I've flexed perhaps more than any other throughout my life. I've been in therapy almost consistently for, what... fifteen years? Jesus.

But that's another story for another day.

The point is, I was talking with my therapist - over FaceTime, of course, because what the fuck is happening in the world right now - sitting there trying to brainstorm ways to fill my time this summer. I'm on break from school, and I had planned to get a job or an internship or something. But then COVID happened. And let's just say I'm a little *too* friendly with depression, so sitting around doing nothing for three months is, uh... not the best idea.

So we're talking about fun projects to do and little goals to set, and she goes, "have you thought about starting a blog?"

And for whatever reason... it just hit me right. I started thinking about my blogging roots, about Xanga (anyone? anyone?), about my original Blogspot... about how I used to sit down in front of my computer when everything seemed too crazy and swirly and scary to cope with, when I was still a teenager trying to figure out what it meant to be a human being with an identity... how throwing a big tangly jumble of words into the abyss was incredibly cathartic somehow...

And it just made sense. 

There's something special about blogging. It's hard to put my finger on. I guess in some ways, it feels like marking the mundane as important. To hop on the internet and say, "hey internet, I went on a walk today. And I cried. And I wanted to tell you about it." There's a sense of dignity and kindness to it. It feels like creating a space for my own experience, making a little place for it in the world, and placing value on it. Blogging allows me to look at my day to day life, and say yeah, this matters. 

So here we are. Blogging! In the year of our lord 2020! Who would have thought.

Who knows what this will turn out to be. I don't really have a plan, to be honest... It could be a list of nice things that happen day to day. It could be a series of emotional deep dives. It could be just a bunch of angry gibberish about budgeting (which I totally thought I would write about today). 

In all likelihood, it will be some strange freeform amalgamation of D) All of the above. In which case... we're all just gonna buckle up and enjoy the ride.

Happy reading.