💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 12-08.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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In less than a week I'll have been writing here for two years. My first online journal, on the web and on a variety of domains, lasted just a smidge more than that. Two and a half years? Between the first entries I've found in the wayback (I think I was writing before that, but, nothing archived) and when I shifted to LiveJournal. I've said it here before, but LiveJournal was the slow death of everything I loved about life-writing online. Everything forced into the same template, the same flow. A harbinger of what was to come, really, with CMSs and blogs and standardized designs giving rise to the WordPress Web. I wrote there for almost a decade, but really, only regularly for a few years at the start.
2-3 years has been in the past my limit. Hoping that isn't true here as well. I've been keeping up on the small web, and it'll be two years there early next year. That feels closest to my old site (being, you know, an actual website), even though there, the community feels a lot smaller, though I suspect it's actually larger, just less inclined to email or drop a guestbook note. The quiet, there and here, has been the happiest part. No constantly-lit notification icons. No emails to say that someone's left a comment. Just what I find if I remember to check. Slower, better. I've changed tildes once. I was at rawtext.club at the start. But after the disk failure (and subsequent total data loss), I decided to move elsewhere. Thank goodness I'd been diligent about backing things up, putting them in private git repos. The developer's instinct, I guess: if it's worth doing, it's worth versioning.
I think part of the ease I've found this time around, which I have trouble acknowledging because there's some discomfort in it, has to do with where I am in my life, versus where I was then. I'm no longer seventeen. My energy's still good, but it has fewer highs, fewer lows. I fall into many routines, of which this is one. My days are easily guessable. I write (here, on the small web, poems), I practice my musical instruments, I run in good weather. The days' shapes tend to be similar, and while I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, giving a kind of happiness and structure that overlays my life, I still don't think my life is open in the same way it used to be, being as it is bound by love, by pets, by mortgage. There's more _here_ than _where?_, though my partner and I talk about travelling more after the mortgage is dealt with, hopefully in the next few years. Why not get that in. Who knows where we'll all be in a couple decades' time. But for now, for the moment, I'm here. A steadiness, an even rhythm, a regular cadence.
When I was seventeen a lot of what I wrote was really banal - much of it about school or university - and a great deal of the rest was kind of struggling with where I was, and all the implications of that. I grew up in a beautiful city, but my experiences there weren't happy, at least not entirely. My teenage years best forgotten, I told myself. Ironically, I got to a point of stability decades after where I desperately wanted to remember. By that point, it was too late. I wrote down some of it; that helps. There's a lot I didn't, though. I wasn't happy. At one point, I was briefly suicidal. I ended up doing the best thing for me, the thing I had to do: I left the city and so many people hundreds of miles in my rearview. Life happens where you make it. I made it elsewhere.
In retrospect, maybe I didn't get as far away as I'd originally imagined. For a year I was living several borders away, then came back a bit. That's okay. Never settled down across an ocean, but I did make roots in a new city. Started a job, which became a career; bought a house; got married. My life has been a lot less Big and Dramatic than I'd maybe originally hoped, but in a lot of ways, I think it's been better. To meet someone who loves you, really loves you, and love them back? For decades? Yeah, that's good.
Here's to the years ahead.