Next year, this website will have been online for 20 years, which means I’ve been documenting my life on the internet for two full decades now (longer, if you count the Livejournal that almost got me fired, or the various hand-coded sites that came before it…).
Other than my husband, my blog is my longest-running relationship. It was my first ‘baby’, and, other than my ACTUAL baby, is the only thing I’ve ever managed to stick at, or keep alive for longer than a few months. Remember that time I decided to take up Boxercize, and make it my entire personality? No, I didn’t remember it either: I do now, though — because my Boxercize era might only have lasted for the duration of a single class, but the post I wrote about it lives on in the pages of my blog … which I’ve spent the last couple of weeks re-reading from start to finish, as part of the ongoing (and apparently never-ending…) process of updating it, editing it, and trying to see if I can breathe some life back into it somehow.
It’s been … interesting. And occasionally kind of emotional, really; not just because some of the posts document sad things (as you’d expect from a website spanning that amount of time), but also because this single website charts my entire journey, from the day I booked my wedding (or, actually, before that, because I went back and transcribed a couple of my old journals for it, too… LOL), right up until the present day.
In that time I’ve got married, had a baby, moved house, changed careers, and flooded my home no less than 6 times. Six. Times. There’s literally an entire category on the site called ‘Times My House Has Flooded’. I wish I was joking. I’ve also had countless holidays and days out, committed at least 16 random acts of stupidity, according to the archive, and lived next door to an International Man of Mystery. (Note: not really…)
And all of this is documented on my blog — which I guess is probably going to turn out to be my life’s work at this point. (Well, that and keeping on top of the laundry pile, because, honestly, that’s turning out to be quite the challenge too.) Right now, it’s looking increasingly likely that it’s not my books I’ll be remembered for (If, of course, I’m remembered at all … which isn’t looking particularly likely either, tbh…); it’s that time I touched an electric fence, or got locked in my own bathroom.
“Maybe I should turn the blog into a book?” I thought, feverishly trying to come up with a way to make this weird, 19-year-old project of mine a little less weird. “It could be a hilarious real-life rom com — with me as the main character!”
But, as anyone who’s ever read my blog will no doubt have realised by now, that doesn’t work, either. If my blog was a book, for instance, not only would it be approximately 5 million words long, it would be almost completely lacking in plot. There are certain points when it feels like a plot is bravely trying to emerge (When I’m living next door to the Man of Mystery, for instance, and it briefly seems like I might be building up to something, only for it to end with the damp squib revelation that he was just working abroad for a few years…), but most of the time those vague strands of story just fade away, as I move onto the next thing.
So, there’s no real hook (Where is my hook, I wonder? Why don’t I have one?), and also very little in the way of character development. I mean, when I re-read some of the earliest posts, I still recognise the person who wrote them. She’s still me. I don’t really feel like I’ve changed much — if at all, really. Sure, I have a child, now, and that’s something I never thought would happen to me, but I’m still out here feeling anxious about everything, and wondering when I’m going to grow up. I still spend all of my money on clothes and shoes. I would still pick a really great holiday over a pension fund, say. And, if my life/blog were an uncompleted manuscript, my agent would send it back to me, and tell me it needed more work. Like, a lot more work.
In fiction, we’re encouraged to believe the main character always grows and changes in some significant way in the course of the story. The fact that I haven’t grown or changed much in the course of mine, then, makes me suspect that either:
a) This isn’t the end of the story.
or
b) I’m not the main character. In my own life. Shit.
Wow, you think you’re just writing your usual weekly newsletter, then it turns out you’re casually destroying your own ego in the process. Huh.
To get things back on track… I kind of have to believe that I am, in fact, the main character of my own life. Have to. Which takes me back to the first option: this isn’t the end of the story.
Which seems obvious given that, well, I’m still alive, but, then again, kinda running out of time here, plot fairies, so I can only hope I’m about to uncover a decades old mystery, or inherit a castle in the Highlands any day now, and that’s the thing that creates the <waves hands> **character growth**. Because, let’s face it, spending all of my money on clothes hasn’t done it, and I refuse to accept that my life story is basically just going to be me sitting at my desk for years, while occasionally flooding my house as a distraction. I need there to be more than this. I … just don’t know what it’s going to be yet.
I’m still trying to figure out what my story is, in other words. But, then again, maybe everyone is? Maybe none of us really have a snappy little hook we could use to reel people in, and our lives are just a collection of stories rather than some kind of grand, overarching plot? Maybe all of those romance books have been lying to us, and in real life people don’t always grow and change?
Maybe.
I might not know what the grand, overarching story of my life is going to be yet, however, but what I can tell you is that I’m glad I have it all documented on my blog. (OK, maybe not ALL of it. I mean, in retrospect, the world didn’t really NEED to know about the time I found a strange white mark on the leg of my red jeans, and didn’t know how to get it out. And three entire posts about me buying a skirt might have been overkill, now I think about it. Like, two would’ve been enough, surely?)
The older I get, the more I find myself struggling to remember the fine details of certain things; for instance, I couldn’t sleep a few nights ago because I was too busy trying to remember the layout of the call centre I used to work in, and where, exactly, the cafeteria was in it, and it panicked me to realise that those memories have become kind of hazy, and untrustworthy with time.
The things I wrote about in my blog, though, are still almost as fresh in my mind as the day they happened; I can look at certain posts and be instantly back there in the month or year when I wrote them, as if no time has passed.
I’m not sure I’d remember these things in quite so much detail if I hadn’t written about them; I’m pretty sure quite a lot of them would be totally forgotten by now, in fact, and while I know some people would argue that there’s not much value in remembering all of these random, everyday details, I’ve always liked the idea that one day Max will be able to look back on my blog and read some of the stories I’ve recorded there — the stories of his own birth and early childhood, but also the ones that show who his parents were before we became his parents, and what our lives looked like. I hope those things will be interesting to him, but, even if they’re not, they’ve at least been interesting to me to look back on … so I guess, in that respect at least, my life’s work has not been in vain.
Er, I mean, I hope it hasn’t.
