I wrote my first blog post at Bonjour Becky on May 31, 2009. I’d just graduated high school in Albuquerque and was getting ready to attend college several states away in Oklahoma, a place where I knew literally no one. I decided the best way to stay in touch with the folks back home was a Blogger account.

I chose the name Bonjour Becky because a) I liked alliteration (still do) b) I was a Francophile (still am) and c) my school initials, OU, oh-so-cleverly fit into the logo that I designed with a friend’s help in Microsoft Paint.

I blogged about my daily college life: football games, frat parties, what I was reading, what I was wearing, what I was listening to. I was a little embarrassed by it all (still am,) so I didn’t tell many people it existed. Somehow, around sophomore year, I started attracting a small but loyal following of Japanese teens, who loved my descriptions of life on a “typical” American college campus. (My friends joked that I was “big in Japan.”) But my monthly pageviews never got past the (low) hundreds. It felt good to have an outlet, an age-appropriate Xanga, even if it was mostly just for me.

But the more people that started to read it — not many, but more — the more self-conscious I became. A few trolls told me I should stop. And like the scared, self-conscious 19 year-old that I was, I listened to them. Even more, I listened to the bitter, ugly voice inside my head that told me I was wasting my time. That my writing didn’t matter.

When I think about me and writing, I think a lot about a poem introduced to me in Mrs. Bedeaux’s 11th grade English class: Longfellow’s 1842 “Mezzo del Camin.” It’s pretty emo, like most things I was listening to at that age, and nostalgic in the same way that the music we listen to in high school is permanently, maudlin-ly meaningful to us.

In the poem, Longfellow is having a mid-life crisis. (The title means “midway through the journey,” from the first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy.) He’s 35 and hasn’t accomplished as much as he’d hoped to. He hasn’t written enough.

Half of my life is gone, and I have let
The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth, to build
Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
Of restless passions that would not be stilled,
But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;
Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past
Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights, —
A city in the twilight dim and vast,
With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights, —
And hear above me on the autumnal blast
The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.

Longfellow says it wasn’t laziness, distractions, or cheap thrills that kept him from his writing, but “sorrow, and a care that almost killed.”

My “care that almost killed” is worrying what people think about me. It didn’t almost kill me –my particular strain of darkness isn’t suicidal– but it certainly killed my creativity.

“What I may accomplish yet”

So here I am again, writing. Building my “tower of song.”

My only goal for this blog in 2019 is to keep it going. Not to monetize it, not to get good feedback on it, not to get a certain number of followers or likes. Just to write. Writing is the ultimate Type 2 fun, and I’m trying to get more of that in my life. I don’t want to be 35 and still feeling like Longfellow. I may accomplish that yet.