…and I’m still very new at this but maybe part of our main quest right now is letting ourselves be the versions of ourselves that we wanted to be when we were 12. I think we were closer to our wants and needs and desires at that time, still not quite yet ashamed of them but old enough to appreciate how deep we could go if we never let ourselves stop (but most of us let ourselves get stopped, don’t we?).
At 12-13 I was running a newsletter on AOL Zine World and writing poetry and writing journal pages and writing word after word after word in any and all ways imaginable and when I wasn’t writing words I was reading them lost in books: Lord of the Rings, The Babysitter’s Club, Catcher in the Rye, Sweet Valley High, Shakespeare…and it wasn’t just fiction. I started digging all of these mini essays girls like me wrote in their zines. I borrowed books from the library on HTML and CSS so I became the kid everyone went to when they were trying to figure out how to customize their MySpace layout or their Neopets page, and then LiveJournal themes. I just wanted words and art mashed up together in as many ways possible. I wanted to process my life and my thoughts – words were the only thing that worked. And, weirdly, I was very comfortably journaling publicly, so I had a blog long before blogs became a thing. I liked throwing my words out into the aether. It felt like fishing. Do you see me? Do you know these feelings, too?
And now, at 40, I am finally letting myself go to college for the thing I really wanted: I’m going to college for my English degree with a concentration in literature. I’m going to write, publicly, about anything and everything because that’s how I got started and it’ll probably be how I go out, because I fucking love writing on the Internet that much. Substack is one of my favorite things to happen to the Internet in a long time. It’s not like when I was tween, when we had a far-reaching network of personal websites, and those of us with well-off families bought domains then hosted the rest of us for free, and we created digital homes for our poetry and art and stories and photography and music and everything. Nothing will ever beat that era of the Internet, and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. But still, it’s neat. Substack, that is. I almost lost track of what I was writing about. I don’t know where it will take me. I wasn’t intending to write anything at all. Was just supposed to be a note with some random thoughts on being 40 and what that means for me, while I soak naked in the tube with my weed pen. Been having a lot of weed-tube thoughts. I guess this is a part of figuring that out. Writing is thinking, after all. I am trying to embrace that fully and let it show in my writing. Maybe that’s the whole point of stream-of-conscious or free writing.
Listening to my daughter high-pitched, rapid-fire speech as she yaps with friends in a video call. She’s 10 and a half. Not too far away from when I had this prolific era of digital creativity. I see it come out in her. She’s become a Canva witch and uses it in the most fantastically outlandish ways, like creating presentations on her favorite plushies or using slides to create a digital paper play set using assets to create environments like makeup counters and walk-in closets. Makes me think of Palace Chat. Anyone else out there use it when it was out? I made one of my bestest friends on that damn chat client, of all places. Still think about her today, wondering how she’s doing. She was also a part of our feral network of Internet girls and, not shockingly, went into tech. I hope she’s doing okay.
I suspect this blog is going to be my dumping ground and Substack will end up being for more polished writing.
Waiting for my daughter to finish up her guitar lesson. We’ll pick up some Qdoba. I’ll get high. Read. Sleep. Could be worse.