A couple of weeks ago I was looking for the URL of this blog a friend of mine used to write years and years ago. I wasn’t sure if the blog still existed and I couldn’t remember its name so in trying to find it, I googled this person to see if the blog would show up. It didn’t.

What did show up though was my very first blog.

The fact that my very first blog showed up may not mean much to anyone except for me. What I thought was really neat and noteworthy was that I created that blog circa 1996 when I was about 16 years old and it was last updated when I was 22. It was a website built by yours truly in basic HTML that I updated every day like it was my job. It was also a vision in purple/pink, and a testimony of what a nut I was in my late teens.

My rebelliousness manifested itself in very strange ways…

I would hate for anyone to judge 16 year old me by what they read in there, but as I read it I found that I have always been consistent in regards to how I view myself and the world. Naturally as I grew and learned, my beliefs have become more complex, but the essence of me has remained unchanged. I also learned that for me the internet has always been a social tool. There were no social networks in 1996. I had pen pals I found in chat rooms and internet strangers that eventually became friends.

There was a gap of 2 years between the last time that blog was updated and Annush in the Sky with Diamonds came into being. This last one was first published in December 2004 and it existed until a few months before I created this one, roughly 7 years. It was built on blogger, which I suspect made it far easier to maintain.

During the time I documented my life in Annush in the Sky with Diamonds, I made a lot of friends. Telling the story of how I navigated my twenties as I simultaneously began to explore the brand new world of social media, opened me up to people and experiences I would have never found otherwise. Some of the most amazing people I know now, I met because of how open I was then. In hindsight, I was fearless and that fearlessness and openness paid off, if not in money, in relationships.

I am 32 years old now and it amazes me that my digital identity covers more than half of my life. It tells stories of me as I was, shares the dreams I had, and bears witness to what I became.

It also illustrates that I’ve gotten much better as far design. Because if nothing else, at least this blog isn’t a vision in pastels 🙂

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PS- I now have a Facebook page for this blog! I would be very happy if you went and liked it 🙂