Growing Older, Or Just Better?

If my blog was a child, it would have started school by now. Since I have a blog but not a child, it's ok to not get freaked out by this, but still, 5 years... Woah.

The first, I'd say three years of blogging, this place was incredibly important to me- real life wasn't really going as expected (which is to say it was mostly dull and sometimes really terrible) and the internet, and this blog especially was somewhere that I could reach out, and talk to and find people I really liked, and wanted to share my thoughts with. I don't think I'd ever felt as home anywhere as much as I did on the internet and I can't tell if that's sad or if it's awesome, or maybe it's a little bit of both.

Anyway. Not long before my third blog birthday, my nan died and kind of changed everything in my life. It was, at the time, pretty much the worst thing that had happened to me, but it also made me a little bit fearless. This fearlessness meant that I applied for a Masters, I started letting people in where previously I might have shut them out, and in a more general sense, I had things to do with all of my spare time that meant blogging fell by the wayside. Except that it was always there, because I think one of the most important things I had already gotten from this was the fact that actually, I can talk to people! And they sometimes like me and think I'm awesome! (Trust me when I tell you that this has not always been my attitude towards other people).

So. The internet has weirdly taught me real life social skills, but it has also provided ample opportunity for real life socialising too. Just in the past year, I've hung out with Bex and Katie in London (twice! Three times? Twice..?), been to see Bex (yes, her again) in Canterbury, and in a wonderful twist of fate, in the space of one month, when I really very much needed them, I took Tika to Hampton Court Palace and Harry Potter Land, I took Kayleigh around London and (ahem) to Harry Potter Land, AND THEN spent the greatest afternoon with The Other Kayleigh in Piccadilly Waterstones. My screen people became real people for a few magical days and I can't even describe how it's the greatest when people you've talked to for YEARS become real and huggable and oh my goodness the love for all of you is immense.

Here's the deal. Last year I wrote a total of 34 blog posts. Lots of the people who were around when I started blogging don't really blog ever anymore, I clearly have dropped it to a part time activity, and who knows how much I'll write this year. But the deal (as promised) is that none of that matters because the people I have picked up along the way, who are really important, are still here. All of those meet-ups, the email threads (THE EMAIL THREADS), the Facebook messaging, the twitters- the medium doesn't matter, but the people are irreplaceable. I've always said it, and I'll say it again and again- I never, in a million years, thought that writing some words on the internet would lead to real life... anythings, but those real life somethings have often been some of the Best Things in my life at the time.

To put it another way: I'm really proud that my blog has made it (limping) to another blog birthday, but I could give it up in a minute (if I had to for some really weird reason) as long as I could keep the people it has connected me with over the years. Here's to another great one, and hopefully, another year of making excellent friends and excellent connections.

The really short version of this post: I'm really glad I found you guys. Let's never lose each other.