It’s been a while since I’ve published my thoughts to the internet. I wrote a blog when I was, in retrospect, a child. This was during the blogging boom of the early-mid 2010s, when everyone was posting their outfit pics and weekend recaps and avocado toasts to pastel-pink Blogspot sites. I know there are some people who still run that kind of blog, but it really was the thing for middle and upper-middle class white women to do. At that time, I was a tween who was regularly described by family and teachers as an “old soul,” which partly captured it but not quite. I was tired of being a child before I’d even reached my teenage years. In an attempt to forget this fact — that I was at least a decade away from actually being the adult that I felt I was — I pursued my creative ambitions as though they were my job. It started as homemade fashion magazines and elaborate baking projects, but once I discovered the blogosphere, that was it: I had found my means of expression, and the women on whom I would model myself.

I spent an inordinate amount of time crafting an impenetrable, anonymous persona. This was mostly mandated by my parents as one of the conditions of my having a blog — I couldn’t show my face, reveal my age, be too specific about where I lived. I was angry at first but soon realized that by sharing only very specific details, like where I brunched last weekend (without mentioning that my whole family was there too), or that Breakfast at Tiffany’s was my favorite movie (while neglecting to mention that I’d only just seen it; side note, it’s definitely not my favorite movie anymore), I could make myself sound like just another yuppie 20-something with a lifestyle blog. And so I pretended to be someone who bought new clothes every month, who had a place of their own to redecorate, and who tried out new restaurants regularly. I had devised an idealized, online version of my life — and isn’t that what everyone with a blog was doing back then?

By the time I was in college, I’d run out of steam. Blogs were starting to die and I was busy with school, but I’d also grown dissatisfied with aspirational content. Which was unfortunate, as I’d enrolled in journalism school in hopes of becoming a magazine writer. So I dropped out to study art.

And then blogs died, but not really, because it’s all the same content now but just relayed through reels and TikToks. The blogger didn’t die; she just migrated platforms.

Which leads me to the fact of all my life changes since my early blogging days — I stopped being a “she,” or I guess I never was one. When I came out as trans, I started to realize that the whole blog persona (blogsona, if you will) that I’d crafted wasn’t just my attempt at being an adult: it was my attempt at being a woman. It was a fun game, like playing dress-up, but eventually I got tired. When you stop playing dress-up, you just change back into your own clothes. But when your whole life has been a game of dress-up, what do you do when the game is over?

I don’t know. But I have always loved to write — that’s why I wrote my first blog on WordPress, rather than making an image-driven Tumblr like all of my peers. I haven’t stopped writing in the years since — snippets about my feelings, travel, memories, specific meals, anecdotes — and I guess I missed having a place to put it. I’ve only ever written for myself, and for an imaginary audience of people who are just like me, which sounds a little narcissistic (but show me a writer who isn’t). But my inspiration has changed — the writers I most admire use their own experiences as a way of exploring larger themes (Olivia Laing, Deborah Levy, and Maggie Nelson spring to mind). I want to write about the things I like, the things I think about — and I want to write about myself. Because I’m still clearing up from that decades-long game of dress-up, and don’t know what to wear now.

So here’s a blog where I’ll put my writing. I’m writing this post here as a reminder to myself of why it is I’m doing this, and also for anyone who finds this site and wants to know what it is and why it exists and who I am. I can’t answer those questions, exactly, but I hope that this is a start.