There are few technical skills I can claim. Photography is not one of them, nor is blogging. But! I am making a commitment. You see, I have a thing for documenting myself. On top of blogging on and off, I have written in paper journals for as long as I have been able to write. My Facebook wall also serves up a smorgasbord of scenes from movies and shows that I relate to, rants and articles which betray my political leanings, realizations and epiphanies about myself and the world, and sometimes even heartfelt renditions of my life, how it's been and how it's about to change.
Something I struggle to do, however, is hold on to things. Even though I've been writing in journals pretty much all of my life, when I was younger I always eventually threw my journals, teeming with the explorations of my younger self, all away. It's as if I had shed so many layers of inhibitions, insecurities, and assumptions that I could no longer say that what I had written before truly described me. I did it not just once, but multiple times, around the end of my elementary years, then my middle school years, then high school. However, I believe that because nostalgia caught up to me, I retained some journals from college, still. The same palimpsest-ical fancies have applied to my blogs, except that I haven't kept any of them.
Despite my tendency to shuck off old journals, one of the things I used to enjoy most was finding the blog of someone who had been keeping at it for a very long time, and rummaging through their archives. I start at the first post and go through time with them, year by year, month by month. It gives me a sense of getting to know a person over time, and is especially interesting when they are around the same age as me. And because they were unfolding their perspectives on a blog instead of on Facebook, it seemed truer, somehow, because it was in a space they envisioned and carved out for themselves. Not only that, but because they were showing themselves on the internet, where anyone could see, their confidence in their voice and their perspective deeply impacted me.
So, here is for joining my voice to the ones who want to share, the ones who know who they are and what they want to say, but show themselves changing at the same time. Here is to recording both my growth and the constancy of my character, in this space I am creating here and inviting you into. Let's see what happens next!