I have been so busy this week I nearly let it slip by me unnoticed, but today marks my 5th blogoversary. A lot has happened to me since that cold January day in Germany when I wrote that first post with the oh-so-original title of “Welcome to my blog,” but if you have been reading my blog for any length of time you already know that.
Something that you don’t know though is that for the first couple of months that I maintained my blog I wrote in semi-secret.
I have had a personal website since 1997, but by late 2003 I was bored with it. I had learned all the HTML skills that I wanted/needed to learn and was looking for a new challenge when I discovered this thing called a “blog.” I was curious, so I investigated.
As I learned more about blogging, not only did it sound like the web design challenge that I was looking for, I also became excited about combining my web interests with another of my passions; writing. Because I was in high spirits about this new technology, I naturally shared my enthusiasm with my ex-husband, who at the time was my husband sans the ex
In what I probably should have taken as a sign for what was to come in our marriage, my ex reacted very negatively to the whole idea of blogging. He didn't object to my learning the new technology, rather he was concerned about the writing aspect. Although he masked it as concerns over privacy, I now know that he was anxious about how much of our dirty laundry I was going to air. The ex didn't prohibit me from starting a blog, but at the same time given his feelings I let the matter drop and didn't mention my desire to start a blog again.
However, the blogging bug had bitten me. Over the next few weeks I spent a lot of time surfing blogs to get an idea of what exactly people wrote about. I became convinced that blogging was something I wanted to try, so finally one day I started my blog.
I didn't tell the ex that I had started my blog and for the next two months I either wrote while he was at work or I got up in the middle of the night to write, pretending I couldn't sleep. I used my blondelibrarian screen name because although I wasn't going to advertise to my ex that I had deliberately started a blog, I wasn't going to hide it from him either. Eventually my ex found my blog and when he realized I wasn't telling our dark secrets or revealing our address online he came to terms with it and I didn't have to feign insomnia at 3:00 in the morning anymore so I could blog.
By the time that I no longer had to blog in secret my blog had become a welcome fixture in my life. And even if I go through blogging slumps now and then, five years later it still is.