Me and Blogging Go Way Back

This morning I woke up to an email with the news that on this day in 2006, I joined LiveJournal.

In my memories, I joined far before then. Perhaps this was one of my many accounts (because I did have many), because I’m fairly sure I remember exactly when I started my first blog. It was just after my first summer at camp, because Alice and Claire also had them. I opened one and made it private just to my followers, and it was a real diary for a while for me.

I remember that I followed a girl from New Orleans, and that’s how I found out about Hurricane Katrina. She was blogging as her family evacuated in preparation for the disaster, and then continued blogging as they realized they wouldn’t be able to return home.

I also had a Xanga in 7th grade, both an individual one as well as a joint one that I ran with my friend Tamar as the “Gossip Girl” of our school. Oh boy.

I guess blogging sort of fell by the wayside as I got into high school, which is when social media started to take over. I got a MySpace, followed by Friendster, was it?, and finally Facebook, when they opened it to high schoolers (remember when it was just for college kids, then just college + HS? I remember when my mom’s company required her to get a Facebook account, and I thought it was so strange that they were opening it to all ages).

And now, here I am — deleting Instagram and TikTok off my phone because of the time sucks that they are, and completing a 31-day blogging challenge!