Just as I sat down to my laptop this morning, I happened to be thinking about the state of blogging and the atmosphere in which I first started blogging myself. And then WordPress told me today is the thirteenth anniversary of my blog. Thirteen years!

Can I count each of those years as a blogging year? No, I cannot. I started my blog with the yearning in my heart that comes of seeing people having fun and wanting to join in. Back then, blogs still enjoyed plenty of traffic and community connection without the drive to monetize and min/max for views and profit. Social media had barely hit the internet. So I still read blogs, and I wanted in.

But I didn’t have much to say, a phenomenon I noted in many people last night while skating along the information superhighway on a few webrings for the first time (geekring cultivated kind of the coolest results of the handful I surfed).

Before my internet time, webrings connected websites through general consensus of containing roughly the same sort of content. You wandered around a website included in the ring, then clicked on the Next button linked on the site to visit another website in the list.

I have thoughts to share about this experience (it was very interesting! and did weird things to my brain), but that’s a topic for a more focused post. I stumbled onto some really cool websites, and then some featuring a handful of updates a couple years ago about not knowing what to do with the site they’d created before falling off.

A common problem for bloggers just blogging to blog. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I began myself, I just wanted to do.

Many a netizen will urge you to carve out a piece of the internet for yourself over renting space on someone else’s site. And they’re right, you should!

If you are a creator rather than a consumer.

Because if you access the internet just to read and enjoy and interact, you don’t need your own blog or website. That message isn’t for you, so don’t get it confused. That’s how those untended websites got started, I’m sure. I urge you to find ways around the web outside of social media platforms (a lesson I’ve begun learning the hard way), but that’s a topic better served up from someone more informed than I.

I fell in the former category — a creator — I just didn’t know that yet. Not only was I a baby blogger, I was also just kind of a baby. Really young. Thirteen years ago and this blog were not my first attempt. Thinking back, I must’ve been a senior in high school when I initially set up shop on Blogger.com (maybe I should’ve stayed there; WordPress makes me insane). I was interning with three amazing local writers who gave me the chance to learn from them, and all of them blogged, urging me to do the same. Yes, a place to write! The thing I wanted to do constantly! But what does a seventeen-year-old even have to say?

Not much, it turns out. I was still learning. Experiencing. Worthy thoughts come with time to “weigh and consider” (a description that once came from my college mentor). So I didn’t post much for a very long time. I maintain my saving grace was avoiding writing about how I didn’t know what to post. At least I had that going for me.

But just having the blog(s) allowed me a space to put whatever ideas came to me as I aged. Primarily, Word Nerd Scribbles provided the perfect place to begin posting microfiction, such as the Hopeful Wanderer series and my Spooktober drabbles. Also what advice I could give about writing itself. And just many, many book reviews. All of which is to say that I did eventually start having something to blog about.

Is this post really a worthy one itself? Maybe not! I’m nowhere on the blogging level of Elsie of Richly Rooted, whose Recovering the Lost Art series demonstrates a rich sense of blogging community in her posts about blogging and analog living, both subjects of intense interest to me lately.

I just have thoughts that need out in a time when posting them to social media feels like speaking into the void. (Is there anyone there? I don’t know! I think all my friends/mutuals are trapped in algorithm hell.) That’s the whole reason I changed this blog name back to Word Nerd Scribbles. I need a place that’s mine and specific to me where I can talk about more than writing (even though I adore talking about writing).

I’m grateful to blogging and the place it’s held in over half my life — a place I can return to as I’ve begun exploring existence, both on and offline, outside of social media and the intrusion of digital devices. I love the internet, I just don’t love the internet of now. So perhaps more posts like this will show up in your feed from me. A little rambly, but brimming with thoughts and, hopefully, interesting connections.

Anyway, all of this is to say, happy thirteenth birthday, Word Nerd Scribbles. You are now a teenager. Sorry about the acne.

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