I’ve been blogging since 14. That makes 18 friggin’ years! When I first started at blogspot (14 – 17), I needed a place to rant about teenage idiosyncrasies, to practise CSS HTML skills that we learnt in class and because everyone just ended up linking one another and reading about each other’s ‘deepest’ thoughts (read: emo) while growing up.
Then came the age of livejournal (18 – 23), the OG of social media. Through the “Friends” tab, it fed us stories about each others’ days. I made friends with friends of friends just because while following my friends’ very detailed day-in-my-life, we got to know their friends like our own. There were LJ communities of interest groups that fed me knowledge about photography, sewing etc. There was a certain organic-ness/ messiness/ authenticity/ romanticism about making friends on LJ that Meetup/ Tinder/ Coffee meets bagel/ Bumble BFF/ insert-modern-day social app will never be able to replicate. We did book swaps, christmas swaps, clothes swaps, bought second hand things, made penpals. Those were good times – the internet’s golden era.
And then IG (2012 – present) disrupted our lives. Made it easy for us to reduce our lives to photos and minimal text. Many moved on from blogs and with that came the death of real, honest-to-goodness sharing of one’s triumphs and failures. From then on, the internet went down an accelerated path of monetization, of building followers, creating influence. Where LJ was that intimate sleepover that you and several girlfriends had that refreshed your soul, IG was that crazy party/ networking event that made you yearn for a getaway. I moved back to blogspot, and kept my blog going as a means of organising thoughts and archiving memories. The internet became a lonelier place.
My blogs have always been all about personal growth. Somehow the older I get, the more I find myself gravitating towards a physical journal for that comfort.
This blog was born out of wanting a new space for sharing thoughts about brand building. Over the last year, I’ve had the blessing of a much needed sabbatical. Picked up pottery, fell in love with it. I used to dismiss doing a crafts business (hard to scale if I wanted to keep it handmade), but the years in Market Research equipped me with the acumen/ skills and craziest ideas about how this might potentially work, and how this is probably the ONLY time in my life that I could venture out like that without the pressure of needing to be a salaried employee.
So the funny story goes that before MR, I joined an edtech startup as one of its partners. Being my first work stint, we were bumbling around for abit, trying to figure our way around things. And at some point in MR, I made a mental note that it was much easier to work for someone than start a business. I guess that is set to change. <3
