What made me decide to begin blogging, 20 years ago? To write that first post, frenzied and chaotic as it was, and publish it?
I was about to fly to Munich, to further my studies. I’d be living abroad for the first time in my life. I was 22 and had always been at home, even when I was studying in the capital away from my hometown.
Now I was going to be an Auslander. An outsider.
How thrilling. How terrifying.
Oktoberfest and beer tents and Ferris Wheels. Dachau and the darkest howls. Wiener Schnitzel and Käsespätzle and the smoothest Weißbier. Weekend trips to Berlin, to Milan, to Amsterdam. Skiing in Kitzbühel and nearly killing my best Italian friend when I couldn’t manage the snowplough in time. U-bahn and Schnellbahn and the Autostrada. You could go nearly anywhere by rail, at least on the continent.
This is worth writing about, I thought. I have to blog about this and let my friends know what’s happening and how I am.
Of course, I eventually returned a couple of years later. The adventures in Munich completed and already gift-wrapped as nostalgia. So why continue to blog?
Perhaps it’s because I had been bitten by the bug by then; writing a blog post chronicling some aspect of my life had become habitual, as much a part of my life as any other part. And the adventures had changed.
Romance and heartbreak. More travel, this time as half of a dynamic duo rather than with friends or backpacking solo across Europe. (We’d travel further than Europe together, to Africa and South America, to the farthest we could manage – the southernmost city in the world, even – short of making landfall in Antarctica.)
Also: purple prose and vile verses. Whatever struck my fancy. And learning not to be embarrassed by these. Blogging was second nature, like breathing.
Then, some time after my blog’s 10th anniversary, the posting became less frequent. This was about the same time I slowly but surely eased away from the unnatural disasters of social media. The Scylla of Twitter and the Charybdis of Instagram. And the monstrous, Cyclopean horror of Facebook looming above them all.
Not long after that, I began seguing from writing freelance while critiquing business plans and counselling tech entrepreneurs as my day job to actually writing full time for a living. Turns out you don’t have much desire left to write for yourself, for your blog, when you’re writing all day, all week.
There was no more fuel, no more fire.
Or so I thought.
Early last year, we got stranded in New Zealand, just as the Pandemic spread across the globe. Flights cancelled, borders closed. No way home.
So I wrote about our experiences trying to make sense of the madness and how we ended up staying in one of our Kiwi friends’ sleepout while we awaited a flight home.
With fresh eyes, I began to rediscover the beauty and wonder in the mundane again. Queueing at the supermarket parking lot, the golden foliage above our heads, two metres apart from other shoppers. Everyone had to get their own groceries; New Zealand was at Level 4 then, for the first time, which meant all restaurants were closed – no dine in, takeaway or delivery.
Our little walks around the neighbourhood, a nice suburb of Auckland. Our lovely housemates, two English girls who were working in New Zealand; their generous laughter and zany sense of humour. The cooking and stress baking and fresh air. The garden and the birds and the bluest sky. The dining table, where I filed stories as the sun filled the kitchen with warmth.
This is worth writing about, I thought. I have to blog about this and let my friends know what’s happening and how we are.
Déjà vu.
Without realising it, I have fallen in love with blogging again.
To be fair, I have never left. But there was always this unspoken promise, this undue pressure to publish according to a fixed schedule (consistency is everything, I told myself, to show my reader and prove to myself I could be reliable) and to only write the most accomplished of sentences, the most well formed and elegant…
Well, that’s rubbish.
It has to be enough to sit down and write. To write honestly (though I remind myself that what is true isn’t the same as what is factual; this isn’t a news report but personal reminisces through a very subjective lens, as it ought to be). To write openly and full heartedly.
And to continue, for as long as I can, and long may that be indeed.
May there always be another train station. May there always be another adventure, another story to tell.