ten years

Gris foncé 8 (2015), Katrine de Blauwer

Ten years ago I started a blog, it was this one. (I think that was clear but if ten years on the internet has taught me anything then it is to s.p.e.l.l. s.h.i.t. o.u.t.)  

This blog is ten years old, that is a decade people, a decade  (spelling it out.)  

There are some of you how have been here with me since the beginning (THANK YOU, and also probably don't read that post, it's written in the third person and is about wedding planning and refers to myself and Nye as 'the girl and the boy', as if any one of those three wasn't bad enough) and others who have joined me along the way, people who have seen this space's progression from neurotic wedding planning through pained wedding reflection, a dalliance with 'lifestyle blogging' as a distraction from the crippling misery of infertility and IVF, twin pregnancy and early parenthood and then as close to nothing as a blog can get and still be considered alive, just.  

That anyone has stuck with me and my haphazard ramblings for a decade is never not incredible to me.

That one small act of lonely desperation, that one 'create blog' click in the early hours of a sleepless February morning changed my life. From the very first it brought me purpose and community and distraction, it gave a place to hide from my terrors and a space in which to build a vision of myself and my future that might have felt entirely unachievable but was more fun to stare into than the abyss of hopelessness I was teetering above. 

It didn't take long before the blessings it sent me became increasingly tangible - emails of appreciation and encouragement, words of understanding and solidarity, links to things that would make me laugh, gifts of books and prints and beautiful things through my letterbox, friendship, support for our fledgling wedding photography business, actual work in exchange for actual money, actual money in exchange for my actual photography, requests to travel to far off places,  friendship. It is not an exaggeration to say that this blog, that the people who read it changed my life, changed my world. Without it I'm sure I would have found my way out of the fear and lonliness of chronic illness eventually, I don't doubt that we would have made something of our wedding photography business, but I struggle to believe for a moment that it would have been something so profoundly empowering and rich and nourishing , a foundation upon which to build a life. 

I have spent bloody ages considering how to mark this anniversary here. Over the last couple of  years I have struggled to see beyond the dwindling of this space, the slow decline (I lie, it wasn't slow) in enthusiasm and energy that I had for it. It has been hard to feel anything other than disappointment in myself for my inability to maintain this blog as it once was. But as my thoughts recently hovered over the switch that would end the life support that I've imagined keeping the site alive it occurred to me that I didn't have to define this place by its past, by its 'heyday', that what it is now doesn't have to feel like a disappointment, that instead of wishing for an output I can never achieve I can embrace the pace, the quietude, the slow and gentle cataloging of a life being lived (as with blogging so it is with life).

Because as I've read back over the blog in the last few days - reminiscing, cringing, welling up - it's the testimony to the last ten years of my life that I have found myself unexpectedly appreciative of. This space has borne witness to a decade's worth of dreams, despair, changes and growth, cataloged a third of my life (I really should back this shit up) and that feels kind of amazing. 

Over the next few days I'm going to do a little time traveling, a little reflecting, on what has been and gone, what has stayed and grown, through the classic medium of blog posts revisited. I apologise in advance.