This post is reposted from my old blog, with a few edits. It was originally published September 2019.

On blogging

I don’t know where to start with this post. I keep putting off writing because I know it won’t be perfect, and I always want to put my best foot forward. But I’m going to commit to writing this, making minimal edits, and publishing it in its imperfect glory. It’s been a while to say the least. Or at least, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged regularly. To be honest with you, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything that wasn’t for school, for a club, and/or for an internship or job. This is terrifying to me because I’ve wanted to revive parts of my online presence for so long. But every time I’ve attempted to revive my blog, I’ve failed. It’s been so long since I’ve blogged consistently and the internet seems so different now that I feel both at once a newbie and already a seasoned “pro.”

I’ve come so far since I started this blog, though. After I stopped book blogging consistently, I started Infinite Golden Floors as a freshman in college. It was supposed to be a place for me to document my thoughts and my experiences. I do regret never being consistent with blogging and/or journaling because I grew so much and have experienced so much during those four years. Other times, I’m glad that I did all of that away from an online audience. It’s made it harder to try to return to the habit of blogging, but in my time away, I spent time with my new friends, going out and actually experiencing life and learning and failing and picking myself back up.

Truth be told, every time I’ve tried to come back to blogging, to bookstagram/Instagram, to my online presence, I’ve been flooded with fear. Fear that I didn’t have when I first started talking to people on forums, when I first joined Tumblr, when I first started book blogging. But I’m scared now because I built a small presence. I never had a big blog and was never big on book Twitter or Bookstagram. But I wasn’t invisible either. I have my bookish and blogging community, and I love them so much and am so grateful to still know most of them, wherever we all are in life now, and to continue to be making connections. (I should note that current day, October 2020 Jessica is very excited, motivated, and inspired to be back, and the fear is not as big of an issue now.)

On authenticity

Still, I had gone through that organic trial-and-error of my early blogging days. I had had the space to stumble around, to figure out my own style, to build an audience around the time most others were too. And then I left and it almost all went away. Meanwhile, influencers became a Thing. Sponsorships became a possibility. And the entire online landscape changed. Between trends and influencers and algorithms and all that, it’s harder than ever to break (back) in. And yet, I’m not starting from scratch. Like I said, both a newbie and a seasoned “pro.” The content I post isn’t as planned out as some people’s are, but I do know to keep a general content calendar. I do think about social media and how to best boost my posts. I don’t want to spend all my time and effort and not see results, or rather, to see the same results as when I had first started all those years ago.

But to make things even more complicated, people have started to realize how contrived and convoluted it all is. What began as something organic has become anything but. (I realize it’s more complicated than that, but I won’t get into that here.) And now the trend is “authenticity,” which has led to (some) fake authenticity. The kind that is still palatable, real without being too real. On top of that, sometimes we’ve been so sucked in, so ingrained with all these algorithms and trends that we genuinely think we are being authentic and only later realize we aren’t.

I think that’s what’s been hardest for me nowadays, on top of feeling discouraged when I put out content I am proud of, only for a tiny handful of people to see it (and I am SO grateful to those few-I hope I don’t come off as ungrateful). Then again, what even is authentic? Can’t we have different parts of ourselves for different people? How do we determine which is more or less “real” or “authentic”? Can we be authentic and play by the rules of the algorithm (or attempt to because does anyone really understand it)?

On writing

Add to all of this that I haven’t written for pleasure, for myself, in about 4 years. It makes the question of audience and authenticity even more complicated because there are days when I think I’ve lost my “voice” along the way. Or at least hidden it away. Of course, there are the ways that I speak and write to my friends and family, but even that is sometimes filtered. As bloggers and people with an online platform, we do think about audience, even if subconsciously or in a context where “audience” isn’t the right word, in the same way that a choreographer or artist might. We know that other people’s gaze matters. And almost everything I’ve written has been for someone else’s gaze.

Writing used to predominantly be for me. It was an outlet, one that is different from dance but no less important to me. I needed it because I never spoke the things on my mind, but I needed it to get out of my body, out of my head, and I had nowhere else to turn to but dance and writing/music. Where words failed, I had dance, but otherwise, I put it down on a page, predominantly through lyric writing. I think there is so much power in words and in writing. It can be therapeutic. But for the past few years, I’ve put writing for myself on the back burner. I’ve put creative writing on the back burner.

Now I feel out of practice, and the perfectionist in me fears the blank page. I even fear the therapeutic aspects because I think there’s a lot I’m afraid I’ll unveil, that I’ll have to unpack and work through. I used to trust the words I could put on a page, that I could craft into a song. And now I’ve lost that connection. I fear not having the words. I fear being too vulnerable in my writing. I fear writing for no one but myself. I fear that my ability to craft words together into lyrics has disappeared from misuse. And it terrifies me a little bit to try to get all of that back. Because I know it’ll be messy. Because I know it won’t fix everything but will certainly make me cry. Because I don’t know if I trust myself to be real to myself on the page anymore. Because I don’t know if it’s still in me, even while I know that it is.

On the future

Writing, whether for oneself or for others, is like a muscle. And mine has been out of commission for so long. But I miss it too. I long for it. So I’m trying to write now despite my fear of the blank page. I hope I’ll be able to start writing creatively again, whether for myself or for others. I hope I find my way back to the magic of writing, noveling, and songwriting. I hope that it’s authentic to me, whatever it means in that moment. I hope I find that part of myself that’s gone away for a bit. I hope that it inspires me again, that I find that spark that first brought me online, that first brought me to blogging, again (although I’ll need to write for my eyes only as well). I hope that once I start writing for myself again, some of the fear will start to dissipate.

I hope that this next phase will allow me to re-introduce myself. I hope I’ll inspire myself and others again. And I also hope you’ll see that this has maybe been me all along.

Let’s see where these words will take me next.