With the upgrade to WordPress 5.0 and all its big changes it struck me how long I’ve been blogging. While it hasn’t always been the most consistent as life has gotten in the way here and there, this little site has been hanging around the internet for a decade. When I started this blog I was 23, fresh out of graduate school in the UK, substitute teaching, and devoted to plus-size fashion. Things have changed.

I often think about my first blog, a LiveJournal. It was such an outlet for me when I was a teenager. I made my first internet friends there, connected to people when I felt especially lonely growing up in a small town that didn’t seem to have much for me as an outsider who talked too loud and loved things that were too dorky. I remember writing my FRIENDS ONLY posts (to think, LJ pioneered custom privacy settings!) and choosing my blue bouncy cat emojis as my mood. Writing has always been here for me when I needed it, and now I realize, even times when I didn’t know I needed it.

Typing this now, it feels strangely familiar while also very foreign to me simultaneously. The new WordPress blocks, the strange format of the post page, but still the familiar menu to the side. I never know what I’m going to do with this space, but there has also never been a single moment since I setup this blog that I thought about taking it down entirely. In fact, I’ve gone to heroic lengths to save it a few times after it got hacked through a dead plug-in. I think I’ve always known that I would come back to it when I needed it and it would always serve me, whatever its incarnation.

Sometimes I forget that no one owns words. I am so often exposed to such harsh criticism of the written word on a regular basis that I don’t dare allow myself to write. But no one owns writing. I’m not beholden to the arbiters of taste on my blog. This is my space; it can be whatever it wants to be.