The demise of TikTok brought me back to my roots, I suppose, and so I stand in this hallway of mint and white looking at a version of myself I can't fathom every being. I hear Anne's voice clearly as I scroll: "a perfect graveyard of buried hopes." It's been seven years and a complete 180 since my last post. There is diction here I haven't used in ages-- "follower of Christ," "lovely," "did some research" (but not the peer-reviewed kind,) and self-deprecating humor I've grown out of using. The connect icons either lead to accounts that no longer exist or the ones I still use, and I can't decide which option is more jarring. I can see the aspirations I held woven around every word. The Blogger reading list is full of cobwebs: only three blogs still exist, one of them mine, and none have posted since 2018. It's so empty. If I were to shout something into this digital void, I'm sure my lonely echo would bounce back to me. Why am I here?
It is the Inauguration Eve of a president I might have voted for if I was still the girl who wrote the rest of these posts. The app that changed my life was banned in a power play designed to paint him a hero. He started the fuss that led to the Supreme Court TikTok ban, then shook hands with billionaires to bring it back. You will never catch me on there again.
It's all gotten so bad so fast. Oligarchy. The rise and acceptance of the far right. The spread of misinformation and anti-intellectualism. AI-generated everything, with a new ChatGPT rumored to make the old one look like a toddler just behind the curtain. Distractions in the form of hundreds of ten-second videos four inches from your face: celebrities in Hunger Games outfits at awards shows with tickets costing more than feeding a family for years, trad wives showcasing romanticized ideals of their lives, the monetization and fabrication of new insecurities for women. I bought a party size bag of MnM's yesterday for $16 that would have cost me $9 ten years ago. It's altogether dystopian, and the US reeks of events that brought certain mustached dictators to power in the past.
It's gotten bad fast, there's no end in sight, and there's nothing we can do. Nothing we can do but take care of ourselves and each other.
For me, taking care of myself means undoing the effects of being chronically online-- less screen time, more long-form content, returning to old hobbies and physical media, and plugging into a community again. Substack, essentially Bloglovin' 2.0, is the latest thing for the girlies with goals like me, who are creating and consuming slower, long-form content. I made a Substack account for reading, but I can't bring myself to write on there right now. It would feel performative, since people I know would see it, and vulnerable, because my real name is attached to it. After all, I already have this blog.
Why not continue my saga here? It's just me... and you, it seems. PSA that I will be oversharing and you should leave now or forever hold your peace.
It's going to take time to get this blog up to speed with who I am now and where I've been since graduating high school (spoiler: a lot of places, physically and emotionally.) I've got a list of posts I'm going to write, one for each phase of my life since. But this time, I've already written most of them before posting this. There are entirely too many "back from the dead" posts on this blog that were empty promises.
I also need to redesign this blog so that it's actually... me. I had a mutual who was practicing web design do it for me for free. She had me create a Pinterest board of royalty free images to use for vibes, and I wasn't expecting her to use those exact photos in my header. She did a good job! I'm not complaining! But the blog has never really felt like me since, and I need to change that.
For now, I will document what this blog looks like at the moment of my return. I have no desire to make this pretty, just cutting and pasting for posterity.
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