A life in blogs 👩💻
When it comes to writing about yourself online, does life imitate art?
On a shelf in my office closet, there’s a box of journals spanning over 30 years, of which the oldest among them dates back to 1995. In the earliest entries, I’m reflecting on the typical events you’d expect from a girl of seven to 13 years old: fights with my sister, fights with my mom, getting bullied at school, having crushes on boys, struggling with body image, a terrorist attack that brought about a global war.
Then something changes in 2002. That’s the first year I start writing about my life online.
My Teenage Years: Deadjournal, Xanga & LiveJournal
The date is May 27, 2002 and the DeadJournal entry is an unremarkable one, littered with the mundane, stream of conscious thoughts of a 14-year-old in America, entirely average and perfectly unique. If these blog posts were instead cars, they’d almost be ready for their antique plates — old enough to elicit serious nostalgia, young enough to induce serious cringe. (For the love of god, please don’t go looking for them.)
To read about the teenage experience in blog form is to be astonished that any of us make it out alive. All the while, entries are shrouded in inside jokes and barely formed sentences, that sometimes. sound. like. this. They are self-deprecating at times, resentful at others, fully coming into the emotion of ennui. Post by post, I’m laying bare my insecurities, all of my parts on display before I know that I’m made of parts, merely by the tell of what song I’m obsessed with that day.
In them, details are selective. I keep talking about how cold and tired I am without mentioning the last time I ate more than 1,200 calories in a day (I wouldn’t need to remember because I’m tracking it all on a program on the computer in my bedroom). In them, I’m experiencing grief over my first big loss, the death of my grandmother, but I’m also numbing out while watching Trading Spaces, an interior design show. There’s friendship and heartache, adventure and anxiety, self-doubt and self-growth, worry and wonder. There is also doing homework, hanging out, watching TV, going to school, home, work, school, friends, home school work friends home work friends school work home.
What would I have written about if instead I’d written on paper in a journal that no one else would have read, rather than on a screen broadcast to other people’s screens? Well, fortunately those journals were still kept throughout the course of my adolescence, and quite unsurprisingly, many of them are about love. And by “love” I mean, a large number of these entries are about boys and sex. Multiple Moleskines kept during my study abroad experience mark the contrast from the entries of my LiveJournal of the same era. The broad strokes are consistent, but the details are less beautified in my journals. The tone shifts when you know that your mom’s friends might read it. But also, there are the subtleties. My emotional state can be felt as my handwriting devolves from soft, gentle swoops to cursive chicken scratch and coffee spills.
Above all, though, in my journals, I’m a journalist. I report external facts of my life like where I went, what I did, who I saw. Other times, I report the facts of my internal experience. What feels terrible or exciting, what bores or thrills me.
On my blog, I can be something else and not just one thing ever. I’m a writer trying to make beautiful words out of her limited experience. I’m a friend writing to another friend, hoping that he will call. I’m a friend writing to another friend, hoping she will feel loved. I’m aware of my limited audience and somehow also aware of the vast anonymous potential audience that may or may not ever arrive — the proverbial message in a bottle. It’s hard to say which keeps me coming back writing, probably all of the above.
Which might offer more accuracy: the journal or the Live Journal? Which might offer more honesty, and is that the same thing as accuracy? How much did it matter that I figured only a handful of people would read it? How much did it matter that I figured I knew who those people were? Would it have been more honest/accurate if instead it was entirely anonymous, written into the ether of Xanga for a stranger to come across? I can’t recall how deeply I considered that some of those earliest blog post entries I wrote were, in fact, public. Most likely, I thought of them as visible to certain people. In that sense, they were more like letters.
Perhaps there was a desire for connection baked in. When I would lament my anxiety over choosing which college to go to, maybe it was so a friend might write in the comments reminding me that no matter what I chose, it wouldn’t end our relationship. I have often felt it much easier to express myself honestly with loved ones through written form rather than face-to-face conversation, after all.
So many entries strike me as out of touch, problematic and juvenile during that time. But others hit with an unsettling sense that the call is coming from inside the house.
Like this excerpt, which you could have fooled me into thinking was jotted down in my journal last year, rather than at 19 years old:
My First Blog, Exploring My Passions & Tumblr Days
I kept my LiveJournal through college. Then during my senior year, I designed an independent study course on sustainable agriculture, convincing my professor to let me forgo a typical final paper and instead explore my studies through a blog. It was built on Wordpress and called Local Foodie Fight — my first “real blog.” With real research and citations, it was worthy of being including on my resume. This all happened during the early hey day of blogging, when people had blog rolls and left comments on blogs to build readership (I guess little has changed?). Some of these old posts still get search traffic.
I’d attend events, analyze readings, write reviews for D.C. restaurants focused on sourcing food sustainably, and blog recipes made using food I picked up from the farmers market. I was trying to ask the big questions about how we can eat and live for the health of people and the planet. It was my passion project, and I kept it up for a little while after my class ended.
After graduating, I got a job at a healthcare PR agency in D.C. where I worked 50 hours a week, blogging less and less with fewer hours of disposable time, most of which was spent socializing and by that I mean drinking — an activity that was, at a minimum, encouraged by this job, if not required. All remaining hours were spent recovering from hangovers and hanging out with my friends. Needless to say, this was a fun but hazy phase, and I don’t think I blogged nor journaled much. Then one day, I walked into my first vinyasa yoga class.
I’d been doing Bikram for a couple years, but this was different. When a yoga studio moved in across the street from my office on K Street, I started leaving work at a normal time to make it to class, going back to the office to wrap up and eat my sad desk salad at 8pm. Then eventually, I stopped going back to the office after yoga, and shortly after, I quit that job. I was officially into yoga. Which meant I needed another alliterative blog title.
Enter: Nom-Nom Namaste. (If you’re reading this, and you first connected with me on through Tumblr, please accept this hug through the Internet. I think a few of you are out there!) Sometimes I wish we could go back to those days. Tumblr had a very special magic to it, a distinctly underground culture, like you could both be original in whatever your particular brand was, but without being a brand. In fact, it felt very normalized to not have your public image or name attached to your Tumblr.
Writing on Tumblr, I could feel anonymous, a little less polished and a little more irreverent. I credit it with prompting me to write some tender essays and other missives that at the time were illuminating. One was a piece I re-read about once a year to help remind myself that life is short, but it’s long, too. The title of today’s post was inspired by the book title (A Life in Men) from which I borrow a quote used in that old piece.
It was a platform that gave me the confidence to write on the Internet a bit more vulnerably, begin to practice the craft of personal essay writing, and eventually start to consider attaching my real life identity to such personal writing. One day, I got dumped by a guy I really liked. In my experience, heartbreak breeds bold moves. Props to Tumblr OG
for her BMO encouragement. Sometimes the bold moves are the best ones, like when I decided to take a yoga teacher training.
One day, probably after getting Ann Friedman’s Friday morning newsletter, I texted my friend Alla, who wholeheartedly hyped my desire to start one of my own. Life lesson: surround yourself with people who support your creative dreams.
The Dawn of Personal Newsletters
In May 2014, I started my first newsletter, called Om Weekly (archive stored here), on a now-defunct platform called Tiny Letter. I’d just finished my yoga teacher training and wanted a space to expand on the philosophies, practices and ideas that were percolating, and to make them accessible to people who might otherwise be turned off or skeptical.
What I ended up finding was all that and also a delightful and warm audience of readers from all over the world. I’d write every Sunday morning, edit on Monday night, and publish Tuesday morning.
At some point, I transitioned from Tiny Letter to Mailchimp at the company’s urging as they were closing down the product. Hilariously, looking back my total audience size roughly plateaued at that point and transparently has not grown much at all since, minus little bumps and dips. I wonder sometimes if I had stopped treating it as a breezy little letter and tried to just take on too much, if my focus on metrics, growth, what it “should be” kind of backfired. Then again, this coalesced with a huge surge of media of all forms, especially newsletters. It got competitive! I think some people, including me, got newsletter fatigue.
For me, writing Om Weekly was a side-project at best in terms of income which has been effectively none minus some donations when I first went freelance. But it never felt like it was “on the side” in my life. It was a central anchor point. I wrote it every week. You can’t do anything every week and not be changed by it. Showing up to the page consistently changed me for the better. It helped me figure out what I wanted, it helped me become brave, it helped me decide to be honest with myself, and it made me tell the truth and then stand in that truth. I started imagining what life could be like somewhere else, started wondering if I’d finished sewing that metaphorical parachute. In September 2019, I led my first yoga retreat with
, and loved it. A month later I moved across the country on a one-way flight to try something new.
By the time I decided to hang up my hat with Om Weekly, I had written over 300,000 words, roughly the length of about six books.
Getting on Substack & the Slightly Longer-Form Personal Essay
I wrote my first Substack post in October 2022. Going into it, I had a vague notion of what I wanted to write about, which was how we can live into our truth as humans. I wanted to write about practices and tools that you can use to “keep the thread” which is to say, how to not lose yourself in your life, how to not look back and ask yourself, “Where did I go there? It’s like I disappeared for a while.”
Since starting ThreadKeeping, I’ve written thirty-five posts, most of which are long-form essays, many of which (like this one) are over 2,000 words — so already this project is the length of a book. Instead of writing one 500-word letter (plus links), I’m writing one approximately 2,000-word essay each month. All of this coincided with going back to full-time work, getting a puppy, starting a new relationship, starting a new yoga teaching job, and eventually starting to feel much more rooted in a place I had no idea I could root, in the desert.
But lately, I have struggled to sit down and write these essays as I belabor how they’ll be received and when and what’s going on in the world. Plus, with fewer essays and a longer cadence between, the pressure felt like it was on for each one to be good and somehow connected even when they really weren’t. Different topics came to mind, I’d write thousands of words, and then I would shelve it. There are so many posts in my drafts folder. If the writing was strong, I’d hang on as if saving for a “real submission.” If a story was deeply personal, I felt compelled to retain it, like a page from my journal.
I am a woman who writes about her life online. That’s who I am. And I found that the less frequently I published online, the less I wrote, period. I journaled off and on, but months would go by and all I’d written in there was some off-hand list or notes from a class I took. I would sit down to write my newsletter and have no idea what made sense to write about.
On my old Tumblr, I often wrote through my wounds to help them heal. Here on Substack, I feel compelled to “write from my scars.” Why? Maybe I feel sheepish, like there are already so many Substack personal journals, and no one has time for reading them all. Maybe I’m afraid of pouring my heart into something only to be met by a deafening silence…or worse, the flood of unsubscribes!
So goes the life of a writer, and I have known that’s what I am since I was seven, scribbling in the journals that now sit in a box in my closet. And so goes the life of a writer on the Internet — you have to trust who is meant to find your work will find it. When my nervous system is regulated, I believe that.
But! My personality is far too whimsical and airy and Enneagram Type 4 to survive on untethered, vague concepts of a project.
A few months ago, we got an assignment in my writing class that allowed me to write a poem that really got at something. It was effortful, meaningful, the kind of work I want to do my whole life. It allowed me to lean into a new, illuminating persona. That assignment just might serve as the proper template for the next iteration of my online writing life (and thus…my life generally?).
A thread is not enough structure for me. I need a fucking anchor. That’s what I learned by writing this piece. So, maybe it helped me keep the thread after all?!
Here is the prescription I’ve giving myself for what comes next:
Find what feels like a yes in your body. Write on that.
Sit down with a clear prompt/assignment, write weekly.
Trust in messages from nature.
Follow the curiosity that feels most alive for you.
Don’t share a thing on the Internet because you think it will perform well. Don’t not share something because you think it won’t. (Usually, you are wrong about what will perform well). Don’t give a shit if it scales or not.
Know that worst case scenario, you will practice writing, your core life calling.
Best case, you will look back and say, “Thank god I wrote that down. It made me who I am.”
More to come soon, friends! 🧡
Thanks for writing, Kelly! Helpful nudge/reminder for me to open my journal and write for a few minutes today!! Look forward to more yoga with you soon ☮️💚