One brief shining moment

Back in the "noughties", I was still relatively new to the internet.  We'd acquired our first home computer about six months after our arrival in Hades for a number of reasons, but mainly because it was clear that life, or what passed for life,  in Ottawa was not negotiable without one.  Unlike Victoria at the time, the vast majority of households in the Nation's Capital were online.  Cell phones were still not universal, and email was still a thing.

It was the era of listserves and forums.  Younger daughter had just been "identified", as the health professionals called it, and I found myself "lurking" and eventually chatting to strangers about childhood developmental delays.

To dampen the hurt, I began pursuing genealogy, which provided a crash course in computer literacy.  I got "flamed" (another term you don't hear anymore) on occasion, but I was learning.

In 2006, I stumbled upon the "blogosphere".  I'd become a David Tennant fan, along with a large chunk of the female UK population, and a Google search brought me to a blog by author Marie Phillips, whose writing style and followers were a good fit - witty and inclusive - it was rather like having friends again.

Many of Marie's followers and commenters had blogs of their own, including one "Belgian Waffle", an Englishwoman whose bleakly funny take on her life in Brussels with her husband and two young sons was very relatable to my own life in Hades with my husband and two young daughters.

The camaraderie of the blogosphere encouraged me to eventually start my own blog on the last day of 2007.  I mainly began it as a means to fill in the early months of every year, often neglected in my journals.  I continued because I found writing under a pseudonym freeing.  I could pretend to be someone not quite me, although a close friend, one of the handful of people who knew I wrote the blog, described it as being "you -- but more so". I took a cue from the blogs I followed, and never referred to my family, friends or acquaintances by name, and always wrote with the awareness that it was being read.

It wasn't being read by many, as I hadn't the talent or wit of Marie Phillips or Belgian Waffle, but I had a small steady stream of kind comments, and I continued with the camaraderie of the comment sections in the roughly half dozen blogs I followed.

After a couple of years, this began to change.  Marie Phillips changed the format of her blogs and used them less and less, as she wrote more books, and a wonderfully hilarious limited radio comedy. She eventually branched out into storytelling events.  Belgian Waffle started writing newspaper columns under her actual name, Emma Beddington.  Other bloggers faded away into other activities: some died.  The comments on my blog, never that frequent, drained away to a dribble.

I felt a major factor in the deflation of the blogosphere was the advent of Twitter, originally promoted as "micro-blogging", promising all the fellowship of the blogosphere, but with posts limited to 140 characters.  Later, they doubled it, but it's not a blog post.  It doesn't required the concentration required of someone either posting or reading or commenting on a blog post.  I've discussed my issues with Twitter before.  I rarely "tweet", but I still find the platform useful for finding out about a current news incident quickly, or being alerted to projects by my favourite journalists.

What I didn't know was what had happened to Emma Beddington.  She had accidentally "outed" herself, as she explains in this 2021 Guardian article.

I was quasi-outed too, years ago, when I wrote a (thankfully) positive review of a genealogy presentation.  The speaker approached me before one of my own presentations, and said quietly:  "Are you Persephone?"  We had a nice chat.

Well, I'm surrounded by family researchers, who know how to find stuff out.  I'd rather, however, not be stripped of my superpower, my anonymity - which is neither very super nor powerful, but I treasure it.  It's not important who I am, after all.  It's not like I'm writing significant or salacious or sensitive stuff.  I write for myself, as a record for myself, to force myself to process things.  Very self-centred, in other words.

I miss the heady days of the blogosphere, but it was a loss that happened gradually, almost imperceptibly.  I'm grateful I had it for a few of those lonely years at the foot of a hill in an Ottawan urban neighbourhood, where I never quite found a home.  

I'm home now.  Blogs are no longer a thing.  Emails are no longer a thing.  I still do both, of course; I'm stubborn that way.