Many years ago, when blogging was just a fringe activity and friends repeatedly told me that online social networks would never really catch on, I used to write fairly regularly on blogger and livejournal.
The blogosphere was remarkably small in comparison to now and I was a very tiny part of the edges of it. I’m not being unnecessarily humble; I really was a very small fish. This entry isn’t going to end with me turning out to be Belle de Jour or some other blogging superstar.
It was more of an anonymous thing and was really a kind of other life. Whilst I might have been writing about real people and real situations, the chances of anyone in real life actually recognising themselves was pretty slim.
Even when I sent them a link and asked for any kind of feedback; I don’t think anyone was much bothered about reading my ramblings.
When I decided to come back to this, I spent a good deal of my time dithering over whether to resurrect my old blogging name or come up with something different. I’m still not quite sure about how much of it I would want real life people to see.
It’s not about the actual content; it’s about the fact that I even write at all. Sort of squirmy.
Like a boy in the class above finding one of my teenage angst poems and reading it out in the playground. Or making a brave fashion choice and knowing within half an hour of arrival at the event that I’d perhaps been a bit too daring. My creativity has always teetered on the brink in that sort of way.
A few years on, blogging might not be quite so on the fringes as it was, but it’s still not exactly cool. Certainly not in the way that I do it.
But the internet’s totally different now and little secret second lives don’t seem to exist in the same way any more (apart from on Second Life, which is perhaps best left for another time).
I don’t want to be writing things and constantly worrying about whether anyone will recognise me from something I’ve written.
I want to be able to write about real situations as they happen and not kept back until I can disguise them in time. I’ve concluded – I think – that I’m not likely to write anything that’s racy or controversial enough for anyone to get at all upset about it so I might as well just throw myself into it.
I’m just thinking aloud in all of this really. Just getting back into the swing and pondering on how it might be really good if I can keep it up this time. For me, at least. So this is a sort of “Hello again” post. To the blogosphere who never actually noticed me in the first place, let alone cottoned on that I’d wandered off for a six year sabbatical.
And, as the losing contestant on Ken Bruce’s morning quiz show generally says as their friends and family turn off their radios cringing with embarrassment, to anyone else who knows me.