I still want to do this

My grandmother was absolutely ahead of her time. Unlike most older people in Spain, she was able to remain current with the latest technologies.

When I was approximately 12, around 2004, blogging was still a long way off from becoming mainstream, at least in Spain. My grandmother, who had barely learnt to use a computer through a course for senior citizens, showed me something that would completely change the way I saw the Internet: she didn’t just consume it, she had her own place there. She had opened an online blog through Microsoft Live Spaces, one of the main competing platforms in the blogging space at the time.

Microsoft Live Spaces was at the time superior to other online platforms, and it probably was one of the early social network precursors. It was later discontinued, because someone at Microsoft didn’t find a way to make money out of it. I guess someone pulled their hair out when they realized how close they were to nailing social networks.

Anyway, the idea of having my own online space immediately caught my attention, and I soon had my own space. I might’ve been the only 12-year-old within a few kilometers engaging in voluntary writing. Now I wish I had saved some of it because I did write a bunch of hilarious posts.

As things stabilized, the original «glamour» of blogging slowly faded away, and the remaining platforms became less innovative and more stable. Some features caught on while others drowned as the gimmicks they were. I opened my first WordPress account when I was 14 or 15, and I recall spending quite some time writing stuff. I was really into computer science at the time so I basically tried to write things that could be interesting to someone and rank better in Google’s algorithm. Stats and views were really important to me at that moment.

My focus on blogging has changed entirely since then. I guess I wanted to be seen and grow, now on the other hand I see this more like an introspective thing, dare I say, therapeutic. But obviously it’s still about being seen, about exposing myself. But most importantly it’s about me, for me, not about what I’m paying attention to or about the newest viral bullshit going on. If someone (even myself) ends up reading these lines, they’re making a serious time investment in it and clearly resonating with it in a way that I could not possibly achieve through other media.

Something about this blog makes it a lot more real than all the other social networks around. I’ve tried to engage on Twitter, Instagram, and other networks a thousand times, but it just doesn’t last. It gets exhausting really quickly.

No matter how hard it has always been, blogging stays in the back of my mind as something I want to do. I still want to do this. I think I should fight for this because it requires commitment, focus, and allocating time only to one thing, and that’s something I struggle with. Most of the things that I feel I’m failing in my life require the same things. Maybe getting blogging right takes me a step closer to other good things too.

Since I know I want to keep doing this, I’ve been thinking about different ways to engage with it. It’s become clear to me that perfectionism will move me away: I’m just spitting words right now, and that’s how I think it should be. If I start going back and forth between paragraphs and trying to make this post make sense, it’s just never going to be good enough. It will take me 4 hours to make a post that I can feel good with, and next week I will completely forget about my blog because who the hell has 4 hours to spare on this.

This year my grandmother left me with a lesson about memory: we must take control of our time and not give up our attention to important things. I am hoping that by following her steps and focusing more on this blog I can start a wave that resonates with other aspects of my life.