Today marks 10 years of me being a blogger. I find it hard to believe. I have changed a lot in this decade – and my writing has changed with me. All this time, I’ve kept a general life blog. Then, when I burned out, I added a second blog focused on my burnout recovery journey (“Pardon My Dust, Please“). And for a while, kept a third blog documenting my pregnancy with Alena (“Introducing CHANnel 3”, now found under the “Family” category starting with this post). I could never have predicted that today, my writing would all be migrated to this site, which I share with Tim!
I began as a rather reluctant blogger. It was 2002, I had just finished my second year of university, and blogging was just coming on the scene. MSN Messenger and ICQ were competing against each other for most popular real-time chat platforms, Skype had yet to arrive and Facebook had not been invented yet. People wiled away their time building Geocities pages and giving shoutouts to their friends on said webpages.
A friend of mine looked at me one day and told me I should consider starting a blog. “You have good thoughts to share,” he said. “You should blog!” I stared back at him incredulously. First of all, I didn’t want to jump on some techie bandwagon that would fade out sooner or later (had NO clue blogging would eventually become so mainstream). And secondly, what ever was I going to write about?
Something in me decided to give it a shot. So on June 21, 2002, I created a blog called “As An Olive Tree Grows.” And I posted my first entry.
When I began, I felt uncertain about whether what I had to say was worth saying. But over these 10 years, I’ve come to see that what I have to offer the world is valuable and that writing is one way for me to exercise faith and courage. Blogging has been very good for me. I have much to be grateful for.
As I think back over these 10 years, there’s one more thing I want to say: To my readers, whether you’ve stuck with me since day one, or have recently come across my blog, THANK YOU FOR READING.
Happy bloggiversary, folks! Here’s to many more decades of discovering and reflecting on life!
photo credit: ahhyeah via photo pin cc