Ten Years

A few months ago (June), this blog celebrated its tenth anniversary. It's outlived some of my friendships (because said friends died). Heck, it's almost outlived the Blogger platform itself. It's listened to me when quite literally no-one else will. Some people think I'm ridiculous for wanting to post my 'private' thoughts online 'where everyone can see them.' I've always had a couple rebuttals to that one:
1. Honey, this blog barely scratches the surface of my thoughts. These are by no means the private thoughts. Not by a long shot. I fully recognise that people might see them, and I am 100% okay with that. In fact, the reason I post things is because I want people to see them.
2. 'Where everyone can see them?' Don't make me laugh. Since Brittney died, there's been nobody to read these unless I post one of the especially good (or especially offensive) posts on my personal Facebook page. In a way, that's why I did this -- then those who really did care to know how I thought could read them at their own leisure, and at their own pace, and those who found this blog 'too negative' could simply forget about its existence.

I started this blog just before the car accident that almost killed me (we're talking days before). As a result, this blog has chronicled my life as I navigated through that paradigm shift and the consequences of my conclusions about life. That accident was a major life event and probably was the thing that had the greatest impact on my life up until 2015/The Year From Hell (incidentally, this blog also serves as a nice before-and-after of the state of my soul in relation to said Year From Hell). Many times I've posted things thinking it would be the final record of my thoughts before my untimely death, and I've also tried at other times to post the happy things that I could not feel in an attempt to remember something, anything besides the soul-sucking depression.

Often, this blog has been a place where I can offload some of the mental weight of depression without actually burdening an actual overstretched human being. I think in a way, that was my secret motivation for starting a blog in the first place (that and I thought people would be far more interested in me and my thoughts/writing career/computer nerdiness than they actually are). Turned out only Brittney was even moderately interested in such things, and she was the greatest supporter of this blog until her death in February 2015. (To this day, I would say she is still the greatest supporter this blog has had over the entire ten years.) I managed to somehow hold onto this blog during college, and it probably saved my life more than once by giving me a safe place to vent when not a single soul on the planet was willing to acknowledge my existence.

Anyone who's been here since the Brittney days (I don't even know if there are any out there) might remember the old name -- Thoughts From The Asylum. I named it that partly because sixteen-year-old me felt like she was living in an insane asylum (while this may have been a slightly extreme take on the situation, it was not entirely inaccurate), and partly because she took asylum from a dysfunctional home life (from which she had literally zero refuge because homeschool) in writing, which has been a focus of this blog since its inception. When dance started to become a bigger factor in my life and I started seriously considering making a career of it, I renamed the blog The Edge Of The Dream -- after the White Heart song -- in reference to my faith at the time that bigger and better things were to come for me in the world of dance and performing. (In a nutshell -- has that happened? Kind of... yes, in the sense that I have done more as a performer by this point in my life than I could have imagined eight years ago when I changed the blog name; but also no, in the sense that my hope was and still is to direct a dance team. In that sense, I am still, in September 2020, at the edge of the dream -- and wondering when I will finally start heading toward the centre.)

I'm glad to have this blog. Sometimes I read back through my own words and find deep encouragement here, from my past self, words that I need to hear in the present that no-one can provide. Often it provides me with a small escape into the world as it was before 2015, when my mother's family still spoke to each other, Brittney and I wrote copiously and proofread each other's work constantly, and I still had some semblance of childlike faith in God (to SUPER condense that update: I've somehow managed to not become agnostic. I definitely still believe God exists. But I'm still not convinced He loves me. I really think no-one other than God Himself will be able to convince me otherwise).

I plan to continue writing and posting here. Whenever I feel the urge to write but have no clear idea of what I want to talk about, I tend to go to Blogger and open up a 'new post' page. I have probably about as many unfinished drafts as I do published posts because of this practice. It's somehow different, more freeing, to write in Blogger than in a Pages document despite how simple literally all my Pages documents are (I keep them almost Windows-Notepad-esque in their simplicity, even -- perhaps especially -- for my novels). This probably also explains the amount of rambling posts on this blog (which probably also explains the lack of readership).
Anyway, where I was going with this is that this has been such a comforting habit over the past ten years. In this time of societal and personal upheaval, you'd better believe I don't plan on letting go of this blog anytime soon.

Thanks to any of you who may have actually stuck around over the years (and managed to not criticise me extensively for being 'too negative' on my OWN PERSONAL BLOG THAT YOU ARE IN NO WAY REQUIRED TO READ). Here's to another ten years at the asylum/edge of the dream.