Five Years & Three Months Since Blogging

This blog was started on August 15th, 2006.

It’s sort of our five year anniversary around here.

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Before that I was writing an anonymous blog called PsychoticNormalcy. I got that website online in 2002 and I was using Moveable Type (which was a bitch, honestly).

I began writing online because I was reading these bloggers who were telling stories about their lives, and they wrote so beautifully.

This was pretty new at the time, writing about your life online – Blogger & LiveJournal were three years old.

But these people wrote with incredible courage and clarity. There were many, but the ones that seem to pop into my head when I think back to those times include Tony Pierce, Raymi, Tankboy, Gwen Bell, Chris Messina, Ryan McGee, TinkDarkness, AntiDis and xTx. I’m forgetting many.

They inspired me to write, and to keep writing.

I sucked at first…I wrote like a teenager. I wrote arrogantly as if my perspective mattered and as if my life was legend. I wrote “as if”.

Often, I’d try to figure out what whomever was reading would want me to say, and I’d write that.

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I haven’t written here in three months.

It’s been an interesting experience. I’ll explain why it happened in a different post, but I found myself facing the deletion of all of my websites one day. It was unexpected, and as you can probably imagine it created a bit of a hassle if I was going to fix everything.

After about two weeks, and heavily influenced by Gwen Bell’s Blank Slate and Digital Sabbatical, I decided to sit with the downtime.

To lean into it and to contemplate the clean slate as an opportunity as opposed to a dramatic problem.

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I’ve moved things around on this site as a result of the reflection that the downtime afforded me.

I’ve moved them around in an effort to align this site with what I’m doing, thinking, and experiencing.

If you’re reading this in a feed, you might want to click over here to poke around and get acquainted. There’s even a page to see what I’m seeing each day.

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I’ll explain more later.

For now, it’s nice to be back behind the keyboard writing.

How have you been?