I started something today, seven years ago.

Recently, I’ve missed blogging: the process of getting ideas and developing them into a coherent post. Since you last heard from me, I’ve explored new authors and read new kinds of books that I would like to write reviews or impressions of. I’ve made discoveries about my writing process and noted trends in media that sparked ideas I could explore and share here.

I just haven’t done it.

Instead, I’ve taken on other responsibilities and prioritized other writing. Those jobs and expectations have been urgent, clawing to the front of my mind, taking waking and sleeping hours with its insistence. It has broken out on my skin, seared its poker through my neck. I’ve been holding my breath tight around my spine.

(Is this what “normal” life is supposed to look like? Is everybody just white-knuckling life because if they let go they won’t be able to stop falling?)

So my little corner of the internet has been quietly left, accepting its relegation to “optional” and “unimportant.”

Until it started calling me right around the end of November. It would be about time to post a reading wrap-up, if I wanted to. Which I haven’t done since I posted July’s wrap-up back in August.

No, I thought. That wouldn’t be what I’d make a return to this blog with. I wanted to give it more.

The reading wrap-ups were really placeholders anyway–a consolation for not having the time or energy to put other posts out. A way to keep my blog in followers feeds and not be utterly forgotten until such time as I could do more and be more than just a book logging blog. (Say that five times fast.)

So December came and I thought, I started this blog during a Christmas break; maybe that’s when I’ll have time to return to it.

Of course, that was a Christmas break when I was in my undergrad, exams were over, and I didn’t have work over Christmas because I worked at the university, too. This year, my break is a bit less definitive.

Still, I kept picturing that time, alone during the gloriously slow, unscheduled days surrounded by the muffled snow-quiet, in my parents’ house: the day I finally decided to start the blog I’d been thinking about and already writing for throughout the year prior.

I’d thought of the name, I’d decided what my first post should be, I’d quelled my doubts about running out of ideas–I pressed Publish.

I sat at the family desktop computer in the living room and watched my words reach out into the world.

That was seven years ago. Today.

Without a schedule, without a content plan, without design knowledge. Just a word processor and an outdated version of PhotoShop from a disc I picked up at a thrift store. You can thank (or blame) that program for a lot of my title graphics once I finally figured out how to use it.

I’ve gone through phases with this blog, come up with goals, content schedules, tried my hand at listicles, shifted from almost never doing single book reviews to mostly doing book reviews, done a few book tags, joined the Classics Club… I still don’t really know what I’m doing.

But I’ve done something.

If I had waited until it was perfect, until I was sure about my niche or where it was going or what the outcome would be, I never would have started this. I wouldn’t have seven years of over two hundred posts to look back on, to learn from, and to share with people. Instead, I would have an idea that never developed into anything more than a possibility.

And you know what else? Those things I’ve been doing this year instead of blogging? I wouldn’t have any of those either. The move, the school, the job–I did those things, without knowing the outcome, because I wondered what-if and I knew that in another two to five years, I wanted to have something to show for it.

One of the ways I learned that confidence and perspective is from starting this blog.

Sometimes it’s hard to start, sometimes it’s a mess once you do start, sometimes it’s difficult to keep going. But that’s life happening. You can’t stay still. In the words of Harold Bloom, the mind is an activity.

And my mind is still churning out ideas: some of which might come later this month in the form of themed book reviews, and some of which I hope to share in the New Year.

But today, I’m writing a blog post.

Like that other “today” when I started all this.

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What are you thinking about starting? What are you glad you started when you did? What are your milestones this year? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!