First blog post whoop whoop! How exciting is this? I’m sure it’s the highlight of your day. It is for me because starting this blog has been something I’ve been putting off for the longest time. Actually, I should correct that to *restarting. I first dipped my toe into the blogging world in 2017/ 2018 when I was living in the States. If you – jokes, I was gonna say “if you scroll back on my Instagram page” but there are fully only like six posts on there. No scrolling back necessary. Anywho, on my Instagram page you can see all these random pics of clouds and books and American football games. More importantly, there are these little posts called “pinches” that I started. The idea was that I would take something from my day and turn them into – maximum – five lines of fiction. Prose, poetry, there was no clear distinction but that was the idea. My blog only existed on Instagram so what’s on there is all I ever did. A grand total of nine posts. Ballin’.
I’m sure you’ve had things like that too. Stuff you just didn’t follow through on. But looking back I’m not even surprised. My whole start was driven by fear. Yup. I mean now, probably even more so than a couple of years ago, who are you if you don’t have a blog, a website, a YouTube channel, a podcast, five gillion followers and a range of lip kits? And I feel like it’s more than having something to show. Your tatty notebook with stories about magical donkeys (just me?) aren’t enough anymore. You’ve got to have some kind of online presence to validate your aspirations. That’s not necessarily something I buy into, but that’s what it feels like, no?
What I learnt is that forcing it was not the best way to go. That’s what I was doing in between the frat parties and pop quizzes. I was super duper worried about not being believed when I said I wanted to be a writer. That when someone asked me, I’d come up with hands as empty as the Oliver Twist bowl. It’s definitely important to have something to show; the only way to be a writer is to write. But, evidently from my nine posts, my heart wasn’t in it at all. Cheesy but true. I was writing for other people not myself. I was writing because I felt like I had to, not because I wanted to.
But now, stuff y’all! (I joke, you’re great). This right here is for me. I restarted this because le 2020 lockdown made me reflect. For a while I’ve been feeling sad. I felt I’d lost a bit of my sense of self. I knew who I was, but you know when you just feel like you need to recalibrate? When something just feels off? I realised that part of that was because I wasn’t writing. Writing genuinely makes me happy and makes me feel like me. So that’s what this blog is for. Funnily enough, I want to do a similar thing to the “pinches” I started. I’m going to turn bits of my day into flash fiction. For me that’s 500 words or less. Just to get me writing again, no pressure, no agenda, no end goal. Literally it’s probably only you reading this (thanks by the way, you’re awesome) and I am totally cool with that.