so this is where i start again

Wild flowers I came across while hiking in the Dolomites last summer.

Two thousand twenty-five is about to end, yet I haven’t achieved much. This year was mostly filled with a lot of self-reflection, self-discovery, and other inner explorations. I can no longer relate to myself from last month, let alone last year or the years before that.

Recently, I looked at my old blog that I started in 2005 but somehow stopped writing in 2016. I don’t remember why I stopped. Was it because of social media? Suddenly, I started sharing pictures with very short captions. It made my attention span became shorter. Scroll... scroll... what was that?

Blogging was like breathing for me. I wrote everything on my blog. My joy, my sadness, my gratitude, my anger. Anything. It was a cathartic ritual for someone whose life was filled with a lot of chaos. It still baffles me that I stopped blogging. What was I thinking that time? My life was far from orderly, yet I had the audacity to stop doing the one thing I loved the most.

Right now, I’m in a much better place. I may not be fully at peace, but I can feel that I no longer carry as much burden as I used to. In short, I’m still evolving.

I want to start writing like I did in the early 2000s—the golden age of blogging, when everyone somehow knew each other and genuinely wanted to know how everyone else was doing. Nobody was trying to impress. We just poured everything out without filters. I really miss those days, and the only thing I can do for myself is to revive them.

The reason I’m starting a new blog instead of continuing with my old one is that I am now a completely different person. When I read my old blog, I just couldn’t believe the kind of person I was. I was cringe. Maybe I still am. My old writings also gave me headaches—I was very immature. In my defense, I started blogging when I was still in high school. As everybody knows, that’s the time when ignorance and confidence triumph. Yet as I read that old blog, I feel a sense of pride—that I’ve come this far and that I’ve survived.

So this blog will be my new home, where my thoughts and feelings will officially dwell, with the hope that when I’m older, I can leaf through these blog posts and time-travel back to my younger days.

Memories fade, but the records remain.