fourteen years

Fourteen years ago today, I uploaded a tiny, hand-coded content management system and started publishing the first entries of my cyber tabula rasa: a new online journal entitled “i am smitten”.

Those first entries just slay me now. So serious, so intense! So precariously dancing around the subjects of sexuality and abuse, and letting out years of bottled-up emotions. I was so angry — only sometimes rightfully so — at my parents, at my former friends, at anyone who got in my way. I was rough emotions and raw edges. I was young. And I had an audience of several thousand people.

Dangerous.

The new writing that graces these pages now is a far cry from those early days and the days that followed when I was finding my footing and my voice as I called out into the dark to see who would respond. I won’t lie: I hold back now, the openness was a game I played out and a jar I emptied to the last drop. I lived the most tumultuous time of my life out there. I was pulled taut, spread thin, sharpened upon by knives — and I soaked in the glory and misery that came with it all.

Thinking back to the days I started this site, my mind jumps to memories of sitting in my apartment in San Luis Obispo: college, writing, coding, drinking. Jumping back to now, fourteen years gone in a blink and an entirely different person miles away. Thinking about the archives here, things I wrote about and didn’t write about, the memories begin to fill in the blink, expanding it and slowing it down until it becomes something more tangible.

Now, it’s seemingly all vegetables and an adorable toddler Overlord: but it’s change, triumph, satisfaction, and fulfillment. A journey not well documented, but documented nonetheless. Sometimes I think more is said between the lines and in the long gaps of radio silence. But…

Fourteen years. Over a thousand posts. Months of writing, months of silence and all of the memories in between. From a single life to one joined perfectly to create another, moving forward and marching on.

Fourteen years of all of this and I am still marching on.