Maybe I’ll Always Be a Blogger
Every year, when my blog hosting renewal comes around and I receive periodic reminders of the invoice in my inbox, I find myself thinking about whether I should still keep doing this. Blogging isn’t quite what it used to be. The little community I once knew feels quieter now, and the internet has changed in ways I could never have imagined when I first started blogging back in 2008.
And yet, here I am, renewing my hosting for another year. Hooray.
Maybe I’ll always be a blogger. Maybe there will always be a little part of me that wants a corner of the internet to call my own, somewhere to put my thoughts, document my mundane but full of spontaneity–just saying–days, and write simply because I want to.
I don’t know how long I’ll keep doing this, but for now, I’m not quite ready to leave just yet.
Maybe I’m holding on to this blog for the sake of nostalgia from being a younger millennial child of the internet who grew up before Instagram was even a thing (back when the app was only available for iPhone) to now where everyone and their children seem to have an account of some sort. It’s surreal.
When I see former bloggers now creating content exclusively on Instagram and TikTok, I couldn’t help but think of how and why they stop existing on the blogosphere. What made you stop logging in to your blog? Why did you stop writing? Didn’t you miss the thrill of squeezing your brain juice to put thoughts into words and finally feeling satisfied enough of the essay to hit ‘Publish’? And why, oh why, am I still here, casually unconscious-login into my dashboard like I didn’t have the Home icon on Safari set to my WordPress dashboard, every day since I could remember?
Perhaps, I’m always going to be a blogger. I might not always mention the existence of my blog to people I meet in real life, but if the topic arises, I’d be happy to tell them about my journey spanning almost two decades (!) and how proud I am of my blog. It doesn’t have to be a crowd favourite or internationally recognised to mean something to me. After all, this blog has been around for nearly two decades, albeit across a few different names and platforms.
I am someone who tends to pick up hobbies on a whim, got really into them for a while (probably because I spend money to purchase all the necessary so I had to continue, you know?), and eventually move on to something else once the excitement wears off. But blogging? Somehow, I’ve stuck with it for nearly two decades across many different chapters of my life. I was 13 when I started. I am 31 now. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll never really stop blogging. Not entirely.
