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I posted my first journal entry online six years ago today. I find that to be kind of weird. It was 1999, and there was really not such a thing as a blog back then. I mean, there was, but not the way that there is now. Lots of people had been writing online for many years before I started, some of whom are still doing it, but there were only hundreds of journals online back then, not thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions or zillions. Personal, diary-type sites back then were called online journals. That's just what they were called. I know I have told this story before, but I'll tell it again just for fun. The first online journal I read was Melissa's. I found it because I was obsessed with Rent. Anthony Rapp played Mark in the show. His boyfriend had a Web site. Somehow I ended up reading it because it must have been linked on a Rent fan site. He was a friend of Melissa's, and he linked to her page on it. He said something like, nobody writes about heartbreak like Melissa. And I am pretty sure that it was some time in 1998 when I was bored, lonely, and living in Florida that I started reading her page and was like, lo, this girl writes this kind of stuff on the Internet? And she had a links page. And I was like, LO, Look At All These People Who Write This Kind Of Stuff On The Internet! And I moved back here, and I was SO bored and SO lonely and so I decided to figure out how to make my own site. And to good old Geocities I turned because it seemed like lots of other people had Geocities so how hard could it be? I had no design to speak of, my coding was atrocious and one hundred percent copied, pasted, and piecemealed, and I wrote and posted entries for six months before I made any move for anyone else to actually read it. I named it By Secret and Divine Signs, a line out of a favorite Whitman poem. I am very embarrassed by this name now. Then I decided to send my link to Melissa, whom I did not know, to let her know that her writing had inspired me to start writing online. And she posted a link to my site on hers, and then the readers just kind of started trickling in. I wish I still had my old e-mail account from that time, but I don't. The earliest e-mails I remember were from Stacey -- I can't remember what she said, though -- and from Tamar, who wrote to tell me that my coding was broken and that my entries were cutting off half-way. I am not, was not, and never will be any kind of a Web designer -- and I love looking at people's beautiful sites and seeing their work and all of the new programs that people are using for their sites -- but I still use plain old hand coding and FTP and I realize that makes me very stoneagey, but I don't know any other way to do it and don't think I'd be comfortable with all the bells and whistles. Sometimes I think I'd like to be able to post an entry from everywhere and not edit and upload all of those damn pages each time (the index, the archives, the previous entry, etc.), but it's just how I do it. I remember someone taught me how to remove the Geocities code for the annoying Geocities popup and how that made me so happy. My site was so ugly, but I didn't care. People for reasons that escaped me seemed to be reading it. I started a notify list because that seemed to be what people did. People signed up for it. I was like, huh? I really had no idea what I was doing. I just kept plugging along and plugging along. I bought my own domain, changed the name of my journal to Words Diminish (from a favorite Stephen King passage), and went to Dreamhost. I got to know more people through e-mail and through reading their journals. One day, a girl named Elizabeth wrote to me about an entry I'd posted about Party of Five. I stopped using a pseudonym probably because Kymm yelled at me about it. I bought a different domain name and changed the name of the journal again to Draw the Girl because the song that those words are from pretty much totally explains what this space means to me. I met people in person, first Melissa and Kate and Colleen and Anne on a trip to New York. Caoimhe came to the U.S. from Ireland and visited me in New Orleans. I finally met so many people in Austin. I met others in Philadelphia and in Paris and in London. I've met them all over, it feels like, really. There are still some I haven't met whom I want to. I've written about the death of my grandfather and then my grandmother. I've written about crushes and falling in and out of love. I've written about getting my heart broken and really bad and really good movies and books and television. I've written about dieting and my cats and my dogs. I've just written what's been on my mind at any given moment of any given day, knowing that it's captured and that even if I've changed my mind about it by the next day, there it is, there it was, that was who I was then and might still be now but might not. What can I even say about what this site has brought to my life? It's been a creative outlet. It's been a way for me to get my thoughts and feelings out when they would not come out on paper or out of my mouth. It's mostly, though, been a way for me to get to know some people whom I never would have encountered any other way, and I feel really lucky and blessed for that. Readers have answered questions I've had that I never would have known how to research without them. Online friends and acquaintances have added so much to my life -- they've taught me about the things they know about that I don't. They've shown me that people I never imagined ever knowing are interesting and kind and funny and smart. There have been periods over the past six years when I've poured every thought I ever had into my online entries. I'd be like, here's my vein, here's my vein being opened, here it is, world, it is right here and you can see it if you want to. And during those times, there was something highly therapeutic about getting it out there. Sometimes because I'd hear from people that they'd been through it, too, or sometimes just because it was like an exorcism. Even though a lot of those archives are offline now and even though I don't really spill my guts here lately like I have in the past, I don't regret posting any of it. I don't regret anything I ever wrote here. I have a lousy stats program and don't really know at any given time who's reading. For all I know, family and friends and coworkers could be reading and have never told me about it. There are only a handful of people in my real life I've actually told about it, as in, I can count them on just one hand. But hello, I realize that it's the Internet and anything is possible. I hope that others I know aren't reading it because it would really change the way I think about this space if I knew that they were, but I just tell myself that they aren't. It makes it easier. If I knew that everyone I knew were reading it, I'm not sure I could keep doing it. I know that sounds absurd. I am not so delusional that I think it can't or won't be found or isn't being read by everyone I've ever met. I have to write under the assumption that anyone could be reading at any given time. I just like to pretend that they're not. I don't want to become a stats-obsessed person because I just think that's no way to live. This is not a very linear or cohesive or chronological or coherent reflection upon any of this. But I just want to say that I'm glad I sat down six years ago and wrote that stupid first little entry quoting Walt Whitman and Peter Pan. I'm still searching for a lot of the same things I was back then. I don't know what the future of this site is or if I will need to update it technologically or what I will write about or when. But I am glad it's still here and that I'm still here and that you're still here. And I know I'll keep doing it for as long as I feel that way.
About this time in ...
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