A Decade Of Blogging!

 

It has officially been over ten years since I wrote my first blog post.

That's right. 

I have been blogging for over a decade.

Now, before anybody decides to go digging through the archives and fact-check that statement, I said I have been blogging for ten years. 

I did NOT say I have been blogging consistently for ten years.

Those are two very different statements.

There were years where I wrote regularly. 

There were years where I wrote once. 

There may have even been years where this blog sat completely untouched while collecting the digital equivalent of dust.

But the first post went up in March of 2016, it is now 2026, and I am still writing.

Therefore, ten years.

The math checks out.

When I started this blog, I wasn't trying to become a writer.

I wasn't building a brand. 

I wasn't trying to gain followers. 

I didn't have a content strategy, a five-year plan, or really any plan whatsoever.

I just wanted to tell some stories.

And apparently I had enough stories about my childhood and school years that I managed to stretch kindergarten through 12th grade into 13 different blog posts.

Which, looking back, probably should've been the first indication that brevity was never going to be one of my strengths.

But that was the beginning.

Eventually I ran out of grades.

And yet, somehow, I didn't completely run out of things to talk about.

Over the years, this blog has gone in directions I never would've predicted when I started writing about elementary school in 2016.

I've written about growing up.

I've written about friendship.

I've written about things that bother me, things that make me laugh, things I've learned, things I still don't understand, and things that probably didn't require an entire blog post but received one anyway.

It all started with me taking you through all of my school years, from kindergarten all the way through my senior year of high school.

You learned about the fact that I am the two-time, back-to-back, 1994, 1995, Woodland Elementary School Four Square Champion, and that any chance I have to make a reference to that objective fact, I don't hesitate.

If I hesitated in the Four Square Tournaments back in the day, I would never have won a championship to begin with.

Let alone two of them.

Back-To-Back.

But I digress.

I've talked about a little bit of everything over the years.

My love of video games.

My love of professional wrestling.

My absolute disdain for pickles.

My Ultimate Photo Album.

Why I've chosen to never drink alcohol.

My blossoming lollipop side hustle during my high school years.

My first job at The Summer House.

What it's like to lose one of your best friends when he still had his whole life ahead of him.

Putting undue pressure on yourself to always be "on."

Realizing that you don't always have to be doing something.

Prioritizing your own health and wellness.

The highest of highs, the lowest of lows, and everything in between.

That's what we call life.

At some point, what started as me telling stories from my past became a place for me to write about whatever happened to be occupying space in my brain that particular week.

And considering I now also have a podcast literally called Jerome's Gibberish, apparently I eventually stopped pretending there was supposed to be a theme.

Now, I am certainly not going to sit here and pretend I've spent ten years diligently producing blogs every single week.

Again: the archives exist.

I cannot destroy the evidence.

There were some LONG breaks.

There were times when I'd suddenly decide, "Hey, I should write another blog," write one, and then apparently decide I had fulfilled my blogging obligations for the fiscal year.

Considering there were two separate gaps of over 500 days between posts, some of those years were a little slim.

But I kept coming back to it.

And I think that's actually one of my favorite parts about looking back on this now.

Sometimes we think that if we stop doing something, we've quit.

Maybe we got busy. 

Maybe our interests changed. 

Maybe life happened. 

Maybe something that used to be important to us just wasn't important for a while.

That doesn't necessarily mean we're finished with it.

Sometimes you come back.

It took me the better part of ten years to finally turn something I started in 2016 into something I genuinely look forward to doing every week.

Apparently I'm nothing if not efficient.

One strange part about doing this for this long is that there is now a written record of things I thought about ten years ago.

And I'm not the exact same person I was in 2016.

There are probably things I would word differently today. 

Things I would approach differently. 

Opinions that have changed. 

Stories I'd tell differently.

And I'm sure there's plenty of writing that current-day me could look at and think:

"Good grief, who let this guy have a blog?"

But that's also kind of the point.

That was me then.

This is me now.

And ten years from now, if I'm still doing this, maybe 50-year-old me will look back at this exact post and wonder what the heck 40-year-old me was talking about.

Honestly, that seems likely.

But seriously...thank you.

All jokes aside, there's one thing I've come to appreciate more now than I probably ever did when I started this.

Nobody has to read this.

Nobody owes me their time or attention.

Every single time I post one of these, somebody has to make the decision to click on it and spend a few minutes reading whatever happened to come out of my head that week.

And that's pretty cool.

So if you were there when I started writing about my school years in 2016, thank you.

If you found this blog somewhere along the way, thank you.

If you've only started reading recently, thank you.

If you've read every single thing I've ever written, I owe you a high five or something, and thank you.

And if you've only ever read one thing I've written, thank you for that too.

Because whether you've read one post or all of them, at some point you decided that something I had to say was worth a few minutes of your time.

I don't take that for granted.

I have absolutely no idea what this blog is going to look like ten years from now.

I don't know what I'll be writing about.

I don't know what my life will look like.

I don't even know if I'll still be doing this.

Then again, the guy who wrote that first blog post in March of 2016 had absolutely no idea I'd still be sitting here writing one in 2026 either.

So...

Here's to ten years of blogging.

Or, more accurately, here's to starting a blog ten years ago, occasionally remembering that I had one, and somehow ending up here.

See you next week.