Old Enough to Vote

My blog has not always existed in the same place or on the same platform, but if it were a human? It’d be old enough to vote; to get married, and drink (in the UK, at least); to get a tattoo, and a credit card; to move out and get an apartment, or go to freaking university, all without parental consent. How wild is that?

My very first ever post was in February 2007—over eighteen years ago!

Or to put it another way, I’ve been sharing parts of my life online for just over half the length of said life.

Most of the old posts have been taken down in the years since, which is honestly for the best, but I still have copies of a lot of them. This site is archived back to 2015, and I have 2010-2014 saved to my laptop.

I once printed out my 2008 and 2009 posts, to keep in hard copy, because I was proud of having written so much (valid) and I considered them to be profound and worth keeping (not so valid). Those printouts no longer exist, and I don’t believe digital versions of those particular posts are stored anywhere either, which is a shame. They may not be profound, or matter to anyone else, but I do wish Past Ellie had kept them to look back on—especially considering how much paper and ink they used! (I’m cringing just thinking about it.)

Regardless, I still think it’s great that I’ve been writing for so long, and I am proud of myself for keeping it up and coming back to it, even if there have been absences of the like discussed in my previous post.

I highly doubt I have any readers still with me from the beginning, but who knows? Feel free to leave me a comment to let me know how long you’ve been following along.

From Zero

It’s taken me a long time to write this post. I drafted it in my head a few times, over the course of the last few months, and then just yesterday I wrote something only to delete it and start again now. Which I suppose is fitting, given the topic.

I want to get this right—to express what I’m thinking in the right way—but it’s tricky because I’m out of practice and also because there’s that great big elephant in the way. And the elephant is why I’m out of practice.

So. Let me rewind.

The last thing I posted to this blog was in January last year, and that was just a recap of 2023. Since then, my whole world fell apart and I’ve been rebuilding, brick by brick.

If you’ve been my Facebook friend during that time, you likely know the details, or at least the basic gist. If not… I honestly don’t know how much I want to get into the specifics. I definitely don’t feel quite so comfortable airing my raw feelings in public as I used to be. But I also don’t think that change is a bad thing. Who knows, I might change my mind again later. The point is, this is all a work in progress. I’m still figuring things out.

To pull back a bit—and this might seem like an off-the-topic tangent, but bear with me—this year, my favourite band in the world started creating music again. Their previous lead vocalist died, and there was nothing (except a huge amount of collective grief) for seven years, and now the remaining members (plus a new addition) have started again.

This is also the year that the TV show that got me through so many hard times as a teenager and young adult has started circling the wagons for a comeback. And it just feels… right, to me that these things are happening. Or at least emotionally resonant from a personal perspective.

The past is the past and we can’t go back, but things from the past—the good parts—can come forward and live again.

All that to say, I’m writing again. I will be posting here again. Not in exactly the same way as before, but hopefully in a way that’s just as good. Or, dare I hope it, even better? That part remains to be seen, but if you’re reading this, and you’re still with me, thank you. I understand that I may have lost people (readers, friends) along the way, but all I can do is move forward.

To that end, and on a purely logistical note, I have moved my newsletter over to Substack and will be posting there as well as here. Wanna join me?