I started blogging way back when.
I remember those good ole’ teenage days, when it was just school, homework and friends. There wasn’t much else to worry about in life, but there I was, still a naive young girl lost in the big wide world, wanting to know the bigger meaning in life.
And boy, did I have so many inner thoughts. Being an introvert and shy as hell, I never voiced these musings out loud to people. In fact, I hardly talked to anyone. (This was told to me by my own high school classmates, who I’m still friends with after all these years. I don’t remember this, but that’s probably because I was having my own conversations in my head.) I thought I was a weird kid in school and that no one understood me.
What I thought I’d do instead, was to write mass emails to my friends and connections, describing my inner thoughts and feelings in poetry, prose or however best I could. This was back in the late 90s, way before blogging ever became a thing, and they thought I was speaking directly to them.
I’d send them a poem:
dark nights
lonely hearts
never did you know
the hurt I felt
Or something to that effect. I can’t remember anymore because I lost those emails in the world wide web. I remember printing them out — a whole stack of papers and ink wasted — thinking that one day I’d compile them into a book, because you know, everyone likes a good confessional. That stack of papers was lost too.
So I guess I can’t quite proclaim myself to be the first email blogger of the interwebs.
However, it wasn’t until many years later, that I understood this was one of my superpowers. Writing. Empathizing. Finding my voice. Understanding the emotional nuances in life and giving voice to them, so that people had the permission to do the same.
I always feel an impostor when people ask me if I write. But the truth is, I’ve always written. I write to find my truth, I write for others to find theirs, I write to express a thought. I may not write profound well-researched insights with footnotes and appendixes, I may not have been a journalist and collated experts’ experiences into a well-formed discussion or point of view, but I’ve written ever since I knew how to, and I’ll keep writing until I’m dead, because it’s such a part of me.