I’m Back! (Why am I back?)
Once upon a time and a long, long time ago, in a life that feels so far, far away, I was a blogger. I wasn’t an “influencer” or a “content creator”, because those words didn’t even exist back then. I just wrote a blog.
It was 2009 and I was 28 years old. I had gotten married the year before, in 2008, at the age of 27. And I’d graduated from college the year before that, in 2007, at the age of 26. That same year I’d also moved to Portland Oregon, and bought a house there. 2007 was a big year.
I started blogging because I was lost and lonely in a new city. I was unmoored. I was bored. I was bursting with creativity and desperate for connection.
So I wrote. And I kept writing. I blogged for almost 11 years, from January 2009 until December 2019. During those years I became a mother, I wrote and published two books, I left Portland, got a divorce, navigated single motherhood in the most expensive region in America, I went to graduate school, opened and ran a wine bar, earned my Master’s degree, and ultimately I built a beautiful life for me and my little boy. And I shared it all. It was hard times and I made a bunch of mistakes along the way, but despite all of that I somehow landed on my feet.
And then, I quit blogging. On the cusp of 2020, I quit blogging because my son was 9 years old and I felt like he deserved his privacy. I quit blogging because my new career was just taking off and it required my undivided attention. I quit blogging because after all of those hard years I was just so, so tired.
I’ve never regretted quitting Bonzai Aphrodite. I simply wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t know for certain that it was the right thing to do.
But I did miss writing. I really missed writing.
A few months back, I googled my old blog. It’s all still up, so that’s something that I do from time to time. This time, Waits was hungry and he remains a picky eater after all these years, so I googled my own blog looking for inspiration. For snack trays.
And do you know what happens nowadays when you google something?
You get an AI summary.
And indeed, there it was. An AI summary. About ME. About my blog, and my snack trays, all neat and concise and written in that annoyingly-overstated AI summary sort of way.
What a fuckin trip!
Below the AI summary was a link to a post, but not one of my own. It was a random Patreon post from some random internet girlie. And it was … about … ME.
Talk about a fuckin’ trip.
This post (since paywalled) was a semi-loving, semi-snarky walk down memory lane. A nostalgic romp of good ol’ ribbing, targeting the mid-aughts vegan blogosphere in all of our spectacular twee glory, and very specifically targeting moi. It was a roast in true roast fashion and I didn’t take offense. I mean, back then I was taking blurry photos of all my freaky food and talking at length about my bowel movements and wearing socks on my arms, let’s be so real. There was a lot to work with.
Anyway, the reminiscing hit hard and before I knew it I was entirely down the rabbit hole. I spent a whole weekend reading through the archives of my own blog.
And I loved it. I felt so much joy, just absolutely immense gratitude that I had captured my life – and Waits’s childhood – in such vivid detail. I read about things that I had completely forgotten about. Things that I never imagined I could have forgotten - like that Waits went through a phase of calling me “Momazing.”
How could I have forgotten that??
It had me reeling, reflecting on how much has happened in the past 7 years, and how much I have done and how much he has grown. How it all seems to have flown by in a blink. And what else might I be forgetting?
And I thought about how I used to fight so hard for my happiness, how I had to struggle to find the smallest bright spots because life was HARD back then. It felt unrelenting and exhausting and yet still, so precious.
And now?
We’ve come such a long way. It’s still hard because life is just always hard, isn’t it? But the difficulty shows up in different ways. Like, I’m 45 now and my body is beginning to break down (I had spinal surgery last year - twice). And I have a whole-ass career but nobody told me that you could be living this incredibly adult life and still feel like a child playing dress-up every day. That’s hard. Parenting a teenager can be hard (mostly it’s just great). But Waits is also older now, and I don’t think I need to shield him in quite the same way.
So yeah, life is never easy. But damn I love the one I’ve built. I really do.
And what I came to realize as I read back through my old life, was that I’d like to write about this new one, too. OG longform, journal-style blogging. I miss that!
I miss writing for love; writing to process. Writing to make sense of your insides, to put your insides on the outside so that you could take a step back and really see them. Don’t you miss that?
Nowadays it feels like everyone online is just selling something. Selling a system, selling a supplement, selling a hot take so they can sell ads on their hot podcast. Or selling envy, selling a fantasy, selling a story they’re trying to sell themselves about their lives.
I have no interest in any of that.
But I do have interest. I have so much love for this world, and I’m dying to put it somewhere. To pin it as permanently as I can. So that I can revisit it in 7 years and marvel at how much I’ve continued to change and how much more he has grown. Again. And again.
So, yeah. I built this blog and now I’m going to fill it up with little bits of my insides. All the ways I love the world, and also the hard stuff too.
And if you’re here, thanks for reading.
xoxo
~S
