On Keeping a Blog: the value of revising and revisiting records

I kept a blog in high school and college. I used Tumblr then because I started writing in the early aughts. My followers included other people in my life who also used Tumblr: my sister, my first serious boyfriend, and a few other writerly friends.

When my boyfriend and I split up part way through college, our blogs became a temporary surrogate for our once-constant communication. We would scour one another’s Tumblrs for writing and photos, hoping to tease out information about how we were coping alone. My writing contained hints that were cryptic but not really subtle. I recorded almost everything in my life back then. Eventually, though, I grew tired of this convoluted connection and deleted the blog. Beforehand, I copied and pasted everything I wrote into a private document. Then I forgot about it. 

The other day I stumbled upon this document by accident. My last entry was five years ago, when I was 22. I was a different person then. My words read almost like a stranger’s. Some of my entries were naive, conceited and embarrassing, and some of them were … good. But I couldn’t shake a sensation of doubt regarding authenticity and ownership. I questioned: Were these words really mine, once? And are they still mine now?

I scrolled through everything—back to high school—and then returned to the most recent entry. It was about “sipping tea that tastes like a night on a glacial bay.” The words evoked a memory … of a memory. I searched my mind for the original, but I couldn’t remember whatever I was thinking about when I was 22, writing that blog post. I Googled “glacial bay” to remind myself of where I had gone—the place which, I thought, the tea had reminded me of. Right, I thought, I remember visiting a glacial bay … right? Did I? During one of my trips to see my sister in California? 

After a few minutes, I remembered something: I hadn’t actually been writing about visiting any “glacial bay.” Instead, I was writing about a tea I bought in California and drank at the time of the entry—a tea called “A Night at Glacier Bay.” Or maybe it was just: “Glacier Bay.” Maybe, now that I think of it, it was gifted to me from my father, who would have bought it in New Jersey and not in California. Or maybe … It was from my mother?

I still can’t remember the specifics. But the specifics don’t matter. What matters is that I would have forgotten about ever drinking a tea named such a thing, as well as—had I not, years ago, planted these words for this version of myself—the memories I associate with a time in my life when I had just graduated from college and started a new job and moved to a part of Philadelphia that was new to me, and the world seemed like it was full of astonishing places and brimming with possibility. If I hadn’t recalled the tea’s name, or if years and years beyond even now had passed and my memory had faltered further, I might’ve made up a new memory, an entirely false one in which I had visited a glacial bay somewhere far away with my sister, during one of our trips to lands that, at one such time in my life, seemed otherworldly. 

But I didn’t visit a glacial bay in California; I drank a tea named after one. And for some reason, I wrote about it. I left a trace of it like a bread crumb, and I found it now and nibbled. The words illuminated some withering but still remnant memory and breathed new life into it, new interpretations. At the very least, they led to new writing.

And that’s the point of this entry: to remind us of the potential in recording our lives as we go. Whether we write nonfiction, fiction or poetry, our work will be richer for it, and so, too, will our memories.

It’s a simple argument, and a well-trodden one. Joan Didion attested to such record-keeping in “On Keeping a Notebook.” There’s also a fantastic few pages on it in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. Starting on page 169, one of the novel’s main protagonists writes about rediscovering her own journal: 

“Reading the book again now gives me such a strange sensation. Was I really like that once? A person capable of dropping down into the most fleeting of impressions, and dilating them somehow, dwelling inside them, and finding riches and beauty there. … I wonder whether the book itself, the process of writing the book, caused me to live that way, or whether I wrote because I wanted to record that kind of experience as it was happening.”

Rooney, in that wonderful way writers do, puts into words here something I have so often felt. My memory surrounding the span of my life when I kept a blog seems stronger, in some ways, than any other time. Or maybe it’s not that my memory is stronger so much as the depth of feeling and perception I recall from this time. Everything seemed so visceral. 

The years after I deleted my blog—23 to 26—are different. They’re a little blurrier. Sometimes it seems like I experienced a smaller window of feeling during this time, or like I wasn’t quite as alert to whatever was happening around me. It’s not that I stopped writing during those years—I worked as a reporter and still journaled for myself, using notebooks. And I’ve always loved notebooks; they informed my blog and vice versa. But notebooks are private. You don’t share them. 

I felt a responsibility to my blog, even if it was on Tumblr and had only a handful of followers. Through it, I maintained an identity as a writer. This caused me to take my entries more seriously. I would record what I was thinking or feeling, and then, after some time had passed, return to it. Edit it. Fix it up. Expand it into something else. I made and molded this record of my life however I wanted, whenever I wanted.

When I think about this now, I’m not surprised to find that some of my writing back then was quite good, if somewhat fragmented. Maybe, like Rooney’s character says, words came easily to me because I reached for them so often. I was always revisiting my blog, always revising. I had what I saw as a good reason to write: I knew someone—my ex—would want to see what I came up with. So I wrote and wrote and wrote, and then I stopped.

Five years later, I’m trying to figure out how to be that person for myself. And, of course, I’m starting another blog.

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Claire Sasko is the nonfiction editor of Barnstorm Journal. A nonfiction MFA candidate at The University of New Hampshire, she was previously a staff writer for Philadelphia magazine.