Hello, cyber space. It’s me again — aspiring writer who actually does write a lot (for work, and sometimes my IG captions get lengthy) and who has turned once again to a blogging platform to… let off some steam? I guess? Or jot down thoughts? About global motherfucking pandemics (there will be cursing, I’m almost 30 now) and cats and books and getting married* and trying to be a good feminist and how we should all be watching the third season of Succession and the seventh (!) of Bachelor in Paradise literally in the same week for multiple weeks? And instead we are all trying not to kill houseplants and baking sourdough and picking up blogging?
The year is 2020 and it has been approximately 34893695468324 days since I last attempted a blog, as an emotional and hella fresh postgrad, and another 585627269076858 (?) days on top of that since I had to blog (and blog and blog and blog) for journalism classes. I might have, like, 8 blogs out there? Why did we have to create so many blogs? Why didn’t professors who had been teaching classes for 801 years know how to make, like, multiple tabs on one singular blog, or link them?** So many E.W. Scripps School of Journalism alumni are out there clogging the blogging sphere with unused .wordpress domains, I absolutely guarantee it. Do you even want to know how long it took me to unearth this old blog, hide all the posts***, figure out how to redo it and also unlock my old password and update my profile picture to something cute with me holding wine? How do I get the title to not be ALL CAPS because if it’s anything I hate aesthetically, it’s ALL CAPS HEADLINES, which is why I work for a brand that uses exclusively lowercase headlines.
Ugh, anyway.
Much like COVID-19, I am not sure how long this blog will last. I do know that I have been feeling a type of way.
Call it stress, call it anxiety, call it depression, call it why don’t I live in California.
I’ve been working from home for almost 5 months, my fiancé was laid off for a bit, our wedding was postponed, I miss my friends, I miss my sisters, the restaurant with the best margarita ever created has closed, I now have to add “COVID-19 marketing expert” to my resume, everything is awful.
I know that whatever terrible timeline we’re in has affected all of us. I know I’m luckier, in the grand scheme of things, than a lot of other people right now. I’m over here like, “Will I post more than three times this time” while others are like, “Will I have a job tomorrow” and I want to acknowledge that I’m not perfect. My opinions aren’t perfect. I have long used sarcastic humor as a coping (and defense, heh) mechanism, and so it’s natural for me to try to make something funny, to try to say, “Thanks, I hate it!” instead of “Thanks, it makes me feel a 10,000 words type of way.” So, don’t take this compilation of random thoughts that maybe shouldn’t even be public (AKA a blog) and compare it to Jia Tolentino or Samantha Irby**** or anything.
There are times I might…try to get deeper….? I definitely have some non-sarcastic opinions about our “president,” about “bottled blonde 22 year olds who went to drink boozy lemonades without masks many weekends in a row and now we’re all still stuck inside,” about what this time in my life has done to my goal-oriented, workaholic mentality, about confronting my own white feminism.
But these will also be ramblings about, like, Rihanna finally dropping the skincare line and the to-go cocktails I’m drinking and how I just rewatched Parks and Rec.
I just feel like I need to write.*****
When I was 14, I wrote a book. Only about 6 people on planet Earth ever saw it. It was passed in chapter chunks in a beat-up blue folder throughout the halls of a tiny-ass, small-town middle school between my three best friends and one rando who accidentally got a peek at it when someone (!) left it behind (!!) in the classroom (!!!!). The other two people were my sister, Emily, who knows my brain better than me—and, uh, me. After that book, all 300-something pages of it I shit you not, I wrote its sequel. And THEN I wrote my favorite thing, another 427-page TOME of a YA adventure that I will one day pitch as The Princess Diaries meets Kick-Ass, and if you are enough of a nerd, that’s probably all you need to know.
ALL TO SAY, I used to write a lot. A LOT. And then, I don’t know, life happened?
I got a boyfriend. I got into college. I threw my creative energy into all of those goddamn mandatory blogs, and then into entertainment-focused pieces for Speakeasy Magazine, the love of my late-teens and early-twenties life. I wrote a short story I’m pretty proud of for a creative writing class, after which an Athens, Ohio Kerouac Lite Type had the feedback “I don’t know if I am the audience for this,” as if a 25-page story about a telepathic teen who saves her prom and town from her telepathic ex-boyfriend trying to use Beyonce songs to brainwash everyone isn’t common ground.
After college, instead of writing more, I cried. I felt so many feelings that I now look back on and realize were completely normal for a Type A, perfectionist, Capricorn moon to feel in the wake of having a magazine journalism degree in hand and no writing job to show for it because economy. Because real world. Because others had more privilege. Because it was okay.
I eventually became a Peggy Olsen-adjacent copywriting QUEEN****** and fast-forward a few more years and I am here, again. Trying to write something for myself, again.
I’m working on another book that I’m not going to share much about just yet. Emily knows all about it, and will help me cast the movie, because she read the first attempt when I was 17, and also we binged Alias together. A few friends know because sometimes when I get drunk I want to talk about it. Even my fiancé doesn’t know anything about it. ARE YOU INTERESTED YET, NETFLIX EXECS DEFINITELY READING THIS BLOG?
I always say things like, “I am not good at being anything but a writer” in these entry posts, in bios on my professional portfolio, etc. And it’s true! I can’t cook anything but salads and buckeyes (during the holidays). I don’t sports. I have a VAST WEALTH of Spider-Man knowledge? I’m also, okay, pretty good at winged eyeliner. BUT OTHER THAN THAT, just writing.
If you made it this far, you are probably my fiancé or my sisters or my mom or my friend or maybe a curious Instagram follower I don’t know that well, honestly, but that’s okay. And if you’re a stranger who stumbled upon this pretty hard-to-find blog (….) um, hi. It’s me again. A writer trying to write.
*See: global motherfucking pandemic
**Is this how blogs work?
***Including an absolutely incendiary review of the “Workaholics” pilot episode — mandatory for my Review & Criticism class, after which my professor called me a witty genius (I don’t remember….exact words….it was [redacted] years ago…) and said I should do more stuff like tear down the patriarchy and its terrible bro humor half-hour sitcoms for real life.
****Unless you are a literary agent in which case hello.
*****A super annoying writerly thing to say, sorry. Thanks for reading half of the first post!
******More on this later, the asterisks are getting out of control.
hi, i’m holly. 