I miss Blogger.
Just a girl chasing the high of blogging in the late-aughts.
Earlier this week, in a fit of masochism, I decided to look through some archived blog posts from high school. Despite the fact that there were many, many things that were cringy and embarrassing1 (and at times vaguely problematic because I was a dumb teenager), it was also really nice to see that I let myself write whatever. I would post about literally anything. Everything is worth sharing when you’re sixteen.
Many of the earliest posts are essentially diary entries chronicling what I did during the week. No grand point, just a lot of things like “I spent the night at Emily’s house and her bed is really uncomfortable” and “I had a volleyball game on Tuesday and it was fun.” Also, a lot of complaining about Chemistry homework and my journalism teacher.
I’m not saying this kind of writing is interesting (at all) or worth emulating (it’s not), but I do admire High School Maggie’s ability to just do the thing—to do it badly, but do it anyway. She simultaneously cared a lot and didn’t care at all. She just wanted to blog, so she did.2
That’s an ability I gradually lost over the years. My perfectionist tendencies won out, especially when it came to writing. If I couldn’t do it GREAT, I wouldn’t do it at all. Even when I did manage to finish a post, it would be weeks or months after I originally started. Why was/am I putting so much pressure on myself? It’s really not that serious—it’s just a blog!
This issue (plus what I talk about here) not only means that I’ve essentially stopped writing—something I actually really enjoy!—but also that there are large parts of my life that I’ve not written about at all. Trips I never got around to sharing and now I don’t remember the name of that restaurant or the funny thing our waiter said. Dinners and nights out with friends all blurred together. Good times with people no longer in my life that I can’t quite see through the dense fog of how things ended.
Some of these things have been documented in some way in other spaces—funny quotes catalogued on Twitter, sporadic journal entries, Instagram captions, and a plethora of photos… But I can’t help but think of what’s been lost because I couldn’t get out of my own way. I was so worried about being great rather than just, you know, being.
I’m hoping to break out of this habit with this newsletter. I’m not going to put limits or expectations on myself other than to just do the thing. It’s really not that serious—it’s just a newsletter.
Like the sheer number of times I used the word “hardcore” or the entire post that was dedicated to a cute waiter at On the Border in Weatherford, TX, who my teammate asked to take a picture with, which I later made the background on my flip phone. Thanks, I want to die now!
I will clarify that this casual attitude about blogging did not carry over into any other part of my life—not even other writing. I wrote a column for my high school newspaper senior year that I fretted about incessantly and never finished on time despite the fact that The Lion’s Roar only published once every six weeks. (My best one was all about my inability to write a column, which is not unlike the newsletter you’re reading now.)
I am so excited for future Maggie content! This is so relatable. I’ve never really written about why I stopped writing - but reading about your hiatus was comforting. Also - deeply relatable is the writing a draft that sits for months. I hope this year is the year of the return of the blog (in a non-cringe way) for both of us! 🖤