The Author Gets Nostalgic for…
What do I miss? The kind of personal blogging that hit its height in the early 2000s, on Blogger and Diaryland and Livejournal, where people would pour their hearts and thoughts onto an electronic page in equal parts of honesty and cringe, or would write banging, impassioned long-form essays about both the most important and trivial of things.
Dear reader, I was one of those folks and I loved it.
Did I overshare, whine, and ill-advisedly spill my feelings in ways that had personal blowback for me? Oh yes.
I also wrote some of the best things of my life, met people I’m still friends with thanks to bonding over our overly-honest shares, and felt more connected online than I have at any time – thanks to my blog.
I was real and messy and complicated and so were most of the other people on those platforms. For every moment that I can look back at with some regret there are a hundred other ones that I treasure.
Everything online feels fragmented these days. Formats get shorter and people breeze by each other in the faster-moving platforms that are popular now. It’s not just nostalgia that moves me to feel like this. I pose that deep connections are much harder to come by online, and that didn’t used to be the case. We have shorter attention spans, too, and that’s showing up in a lot of ways. [I miss songs that are over three minutes long!]
The reality is this: I can bitch about it, or I can do something about it. Well, in this case I’m gonna bitch and do something about it, ha. I can’t necessarily influence the world into changing with me, but I can put out into the world what I want to see. That’s been my driving principle for everything I do! You want it, you make it happen. So here’s my plan: I’m going to start old-school blogging here, along with my regular posts. Welcome to my blog!
What I write about won’t be as uncensored as I’d like, for obvious reasons. But I want to share more of me in ways that people don’t do as much anymore, and a “micro-blogging” or newsletter-based subscription service just ain’t gonna cut it. Also, I’m not dependent on algorithms or support from platforms that throw their hands in the air when it comes to hosting fascists.
I’ll tag everything with #xianeblog and put it in its own category, XianeBlog. That way it’s easy to read in order or ignore!
If you’d like to join me, let me know! Maybe we need to bring back Ye Olde BlogRing, hahahaha…oh no I’m going to turn into dust soon, aren’t I.
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