Five years ago, there was a girl who had no idea what to do with her life.
Really — she had no clue. Five years to the day, 1,826 days ago, she felt restless and incomplete. The future looked both impossibly far away and oddly hurried, and she feared she would never find her place or happiness in everyday adulthood in the exaggerated way many twenty-somethings online do.
One day she did something unexpected: she started a blog. At first she told no one, too embarrassed to admit she was posting her thoughts to the vast emptiness of the internet. She wrote about childhood crushes on movie stars and TV characters, and she tried to take photos in the yellowest kitchen imaginable with a three-year-old camera that had been dropped more times than she could count — producing the blurriest JPEGs anyone had seen (margaritas were involved).
Growing up, she had clashed with her parents over college choices because she refused to study creative writing or journalism. What was she supposed to do with that degree — become an English teacher or finish the stories she’d filled notebooks with as a child? She thought she’d left that phase behind and moved on to more “important” things, which, in hindsight, were nothing at all.
Falling in love with that blog revealed what she actually wanted: to write. Whether on paper or on a screen, writing — preferably on paper — felt right, even when her words sounded silly, even when she could only write the way she spoke, and even when she hated everything she produced.
Along the way there were moments of crushing self-doubt, constant comparison, and confusion. There were also profound moments of self-discovery, growth, and joy. She met real people who began as invisible readers and became friends. She made plenty of mistakes — from accidentally creating a phallic sorbet to cycling through obsessive phases about pizza, tacos, and burgers. She wrote a book, disliked it at first, and then came to love it. Through it all she kept a single goal: to stay genuine and keep her readers at the center of everything she did.
She wants to say thank you. Thank you for five incredible years and for reading her words every day, even when the posts don’t make sense or have nothing to do with salad or cheesecake. Thank you for sticking around when she writes in the third person or rambles. She truly appreciates every one of you.
Year 4 – Year 3 – Year 2 – Year 1