I’ve had an urge to begin blogging the last couple of weeks. Capturing my day, my struggles and failures, accomplishments, goals, things I’m excited about, my feelings on happenings, and seeing how all of this changes with time.

Around two years ago, when my mental health was very low, I wanted to start vlogging. Largely inspired by what I was watching at the time, but also I’m willing to bet there was the tiniest intention of capturing myself before I ended things. I recorded a few videos but have yet to edit and post them. I might still pursue that later, perhaps embedded within these posts, but for now I’ll start with something more familiar to me.

While I never actually followed any typical blogs, and for that reason I’m probably going to make a mockery of a typical blog, I maintained several achievement posts on RuneScape forums (of all places) where I essentially blogged both my in-game progress and occasionally revealed some things about my real life (taking a quick glance at tip.it, a RuneScape fansite, these were in a section that included the description “ongoing progress reports and goals”, with other fansites using variations of “goals and accomplishments” to describe this type of post). Wildly, I’ve maintained such a thread on an old RuneScape clan forum that literally nobody but me uses – this thread has existed for years and acted as a sort of semi-hidden diary. It’s therapeutic, and its format is what I understand. I thought, maybe, I could try, finally, translating that to a real-life blog. I’ll see how it develops, because this is something that almost assuredly needs to develop with time as it starts off very rough, but I’m excited to write and capture my day again like I used to. I really would like to emulate my RuneScape forum achievement blog posts as best I can, which usually goes something like…

• A quick summary of what I accomplished today.
• Any other thoughts I have, things going on in my life, things that are coming up.
• Pictures of the day. (In the case of RuneScape, screenshots of what I completed that day.)

If I can dream for a moment, I’d someday like that last section to include Instagram photos (a social media website I’ve always been too scared to post on) and YouTube videos.

I’m starting this blog under a semi-anonymous moniker (not super anonymous, it’s literally 1-2 degrees separated from me since I use this username on basically everything), at least to start with. This is because of several (probably over-thought) reasons: 1) I’ll be completely new to this and want to be able to fail and test things a little bit without it being tied directly to my real identity: 2) I’ll be touching on topics that are very personal to me and I don’t want the embarrassment so easily found; 3) There’s just something about using the internet behind an alternate identity, it’s one of the few things about the internet that’s persisted and it’s such a cool cyberculture thing that I’m glad exists (in many ways, as someone that essentially grew up on the internet given that I’m a millennial, I identity more closely with my online names than my real name).

If ever I get my life to a good enough place, I’d like to roll this blog into my personal domain and start blogging under my real name. That would be the truest “I made it” moment.

Another random goal (for future me): make a stickied post that outlines your goals, just like how the forum posts started.