Today, I deleted nine years’ worth of posts from this blog.
Around 800 posts. Probably hundreds of thousands of words. Years of my younger self figuring out who I was, talking about my life, sharing my thoughts, slowly developing my skills as a writer and as a person as I continued to live my life almost entirely on the internet.
They’re not gone forever. I’ve moved them all to a password-protected blog so that if I decide I made a mistake, I can import them again. And nothing on the internet can ever be gone forever. Anyone who really wanted to know what fifteen-year-old me thought about something could use the Wayback Machine or something similar to find it; while I admit I’m partly motivated by not wanting all of my younger self’s ignorant, elitist, and otherwise problematic opinions immediately connected to my professional name, I’m also aware that somebody who cared enough could still find them.
The fact is that I have lived too much of my life online, for too long. It’s become harder and harder to keep sight of who I am. What’s the real me, and what’s the online me? Is the me on this blog even really me, or just an entire persona I’ve constructed for your benefit? I’ve often mistaken openness for honesty, and I sometimes think maybe I overshare without ever really being honest and vulnerable.
You don’t know me. You might have followed this blog for nine years, but all you’ve seen is a small part of me. And that’s okay. But I’m not sure the me that I was here is really the me I want to be.
I’m not re-inventing myself. I’m de-inventing myself. Stripping away years of self-creation through text. Can we just pretend it never happened? Can we start again, as though we’ve just met, and all the artifice is gone? Maybe you won’t notice the difference, but I’ll know, at least, that even if I’m dancing the same steps, I’m doing it in new shoes.
I made this blog in 2010, replacing an earlier one. It’s been through four URL changes, three site hosts, and dozens of themes and layouts. And I don’t regret that I blogged my teenage years, because there’s value in being able to look back at those posts and see the progress that I’ve made. Blogging brought me friends, gave me a voice, gave me a platform — even if that platform has seemed to shrink in the last few years. Blogging was the medium through which fourteen-year-old me learned to share my thoughts.
But I’m 23 years old now, and I want to start again.
Hello. My name is Finn Longman. I’m a writer, medievalist, folk musician, dancer, librarian, procrastinator, Quaker, reader — and blogger. I don’t know what I want to talk about yet, but this is where I’ll do it, when I know. It’s nice to meet you.