It’s been a long, long time since I last blogged. It was a different time in a lot of ways, for both me, the Internet, and the world. It was a period of significant change.. I was in my early 20s so everything was already in turmoil to begin with. I’d just started to crack the surface of my psyche, just started to learn the depths of my suffering, just started to find the connections and tools and wisdom to know how I wanted to live.

I had a lot of the pieces in place, but a big one was embracing an authentic life. An honest life where I didn’t let the expectations of others, the imposed shame and rules of general society, and my internalized copies of those rules continue to hold me back. To make me afraid.

I probably took it too far at times. I know I used it as a passive communications technique, in some ways more toxic than others. I look back on those choices with grace and understanding.. I don’t think I was seeking malice. But I was definitely leveraging the blog as a way to say blunt things to people I couldn’t have even imagined approaching so directly at the time.

It’s something I still struggle with. Direct confrontation isn’t my strong suit, even though I’ve worked at it and learned a lot. I’m less overwhelmed by it than I used to be, I’m less reticent.

I miss those days. There was a thrilling danger to it. I was wildly careless about doing things that could have hurt my career, and I’m surprised it never bit me. I think part of that was just timing.. I was blogging before “social media” was a thing, we were just rolling our own tools and site templates and commenting platforms and raw dogging the internet with our honesty.

So, yeah, I miss that and I want to explore getting back to it. Most of us have accepted that Twitter is an unmitigated disaster now. Facebook is a shitshow. And they’re all sitting there collecting our data, ushering in a dystopia that we either failed to comprehend or still refuse to accept.

So yeah, let’s rock this. I don’t know if anyone out there is listening or wants to listen or cares, but that’s okay, just like it was before. If I can touch and connect with a few people here and there like I once did, that’ll be enough for me. And if I can access that unfiltered version of myself again, well.. huzzah.