I occasionally read my own blog.
I’m not sure why.
It’s either a perfectly reasonable act of reflection or a deeply questionable way to spend an afternoon. There are few things quite like stumbling across something you wrote twenty-two years ago and thinking, with genuine confusion, who the fuck was that?
The annoying thing is that I know who it was.
There are my words, sitting there on the screen, confidently explaining what I thought, what I believed, what annoyed me, what mattered to me. The certainty is sometimes quite impressive.
I don’t remember ever being that certain, about anything. The evidence in front of my eyes suggests otherwise.
The written version of me
I’ve been thinking about this partly because of a couple of recent posts I read which mentioned blogging as a form of performance. The argument, broadly speaking, is that the moment you put something in public you are, in some sense, performing. There is an audience to play for, even if that audience is only three people, an AI crawler and someone who accidentally clicked the wrong link.
Or maybe it really is just YOU, Dear Reader. Thanks again, by the way, for still reading.
My immediate reaction to reading those posts, a gut reaction to the word they used, was to think that they couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t really perform as myself here in the sense that I don’t sit down and think, Right, what sort of Gordon would people like to read about today?.
I’m not sure I have either the self-awareness, nor planning ability, to do that and the way I write is almost always far more spontaneous, and very much part of the nature me, not any facade or veneer that hides me away from prying eyes.
I admit that the word performance is maybe triggering me a little, so maybe I need to rethink my own take on what they mean by performance, and I guess it’s the difference between being natural when I write posts, as opposed to pretending to be someone else.
I mean there are parts of this site that I’ve made choices about, every time I write something here, I’m aware I’m making choices. What to write about, which words to use, what to include, what to leave out, and whether it’s worth pressing Publish. Even when I’m not thinking particularly hard about an audience, the fact that the words are going somewhere public changes the situation.
That doesn’t mean I’m inventing a character, more that I’m choosing how much of my own self to make public, and I guess that means the person who appears here is a version of me.
There are obvious omissions. Some things are very private (but ask me about fire whipping another time), some things aren’t mine to tell, and some things I haven’t found the words for yet. No doubt there are still plenty of things I’ve not written about here simply because I’ve failed to notice them about myself as, like most people, I’m not exactly an objective observer of my own existence.
So the person you meet through this blog is definitely real. Just filtered.
The archive doesn’t care
The beauty, and terror, of having blogged for so long does mean that I have plenty of evidence to either back up, or completely refute, this argument though. The easiest way to test my view of this is to go back and see who I actually was when I was writing posts all those years ago. Is it still identifiable as me? Was I performing back then? Or am I performing now?
To the archives I go!
Turns out my archive doesn’t care about the version of myself I remember. It doesn’t care about the story I’ve subsequently constructed about who I was. It’s just sitting there, year after year, quietly preserving the evidence, like a silent assassin in the shadows, biding its time.
But, like all good thrillers, I had to go and look —with a flaky flashlight and wearing my flouncing nightie of course (which was odd cos it’s the middle of the day).
I started, randomly, with January 2004, the year when my early blogging hit full swing, with 5 years of previous posts used to hone my output.
The first post I found was called Maxim.
It starts with “It’s nice to be nice”, which younger me found irritatingly twee. He then explains that he is selfish, self-serving and occasionally rude, before having a minor breakdown about train doors hitting his elbow and the state of the office kitchen.
There’s a particularly vivid description of soggy lettuce left on some cutlery, which apparently looked “like a man washed overboard”.
The detail is not especially important.
Except that I read it and thought, Oh, there I am.
The complaints are ridiculous, but the thought underneath them is familiar. The post starts with irritation at small acts of thoughtlessness and turns into an argument about how those little things accumulate. One inconsiderate act isn’t going to bring down civilisation, but enough of them and suddenly everyone is angry, driving badly and contemplating homicide because someone has merged without indicating.
It ends with the instruction to “be nice”, immediately followed by the suggestion that the alternative is to stay the hell out of his road.
Which feels about right.
I’m amused by my younger self in that post, but I’m also slightly annoyed by how recognisable he is. The references are dated and I’d phrase some things differently now, but the basic shape of the thinking is still there.
The grumpy bastard survived.
Then it gets complicated
Then I found Friendship.
This one surprised me more.
It starts with “That’s what friends are for…” and a reference to the vultures from The Jungle Book, before wandering into a discussion about what you do when a friend does something you disagree with, whether honesty is always the best approach, and whether friendship can survive people changing.
There’s a Han Solo “I gotta bad feeling about this” reference in there too, because apparently even in 2004 I couldn’t leave well enough alone.
But underneath all of that is something I still recognise. Friendships aren’t static. People change because of relationships, jobs, families, circumstances, boredom, ambition, mistakes, or just the general inconvenience of being alive. A friendship that lasts has to be able to change with the people in it.
The post argues for being there for people: listening, supporting, consoling and encouraging, even when you don’t necessarily agree with what they’re doing.
And that surprised me because I could easily have written some version of that now.
Not because I’ve spent the last twenty-two years consistently living up to everything younger me wrote —the absurdity of such consistency strikes me as something even younger me would also recognise as false— but the thoughts remain true to how I am today.
Then there is Gilbert and Gay.
Ahhhh, this one is a little more complicated.
For a start, it is spectacularly me in the way it wanders all over the place. It starts with a question, moves through Gilbert and Sullivan, gets into lists and planning, changes the music I’m listening to, wanders into John Coltrane’s Blue Train, then my dad’s involvement with a local operatic group, then Paul Simon and Billy Joel, before eventually arriving at what I describe as “the power of music”.
This is the same brain that can still take a perfectly straightforward thought and send it off down three side roads before eventually remembering what it was talking about.
So far, so familiar.
Then it gets to a discussion about a gay friend, and this is where I start to wince.
There are assumptions in there that I wouldn’t make now, and some of the language is uncomfortable to read. There’s even a footnote where I stop and correct myself because I’ve realised the wording isn’t quite right.
I don’t want to pretend that makes it all fine. It doesn’t.
But it does tell me that back in 2004 I was clearly still a work in progress. It was a few more years before I renamed my site to Happily Imperfect to acknowledge that fact.
What the archive remembers
That’s the uncomfortable thing about reading through my archive like this. I can see the bits that feel familiar, the bits that make me laugh, and the bits where I think, Jesus Christ, Gordon, why did nobody stop you?
But they’re all part of the same record, part of the same body of work —if you can call it that— and I realise no that my archive has something that my memory doesn’t.
Memory isn’t a perfect recording of the past. Every time we remember something, we’re reconstructing it. We fill gaps, reinterpret things, forget details and fit old experiences into the story we currently tell ourselves about who we are.
Which means that when I remember younger me, I’m not necessarily remembering younger me, rather I’m remembering my current interpretation of younger me.
My blog archives are considerably less accommodating in that respect.
So when I look through my archives I can see myself in them, I can see the challenge to my memory, my thoughts and emotions rendered in black and white, waving a little flag and shouting, Actually, no. You weren’t quite like that.
And I think there’s something else going on too.
Writing doesn’t just record what happened. The act of writing itself changes how we think about what happened because to write it down I have to reconstruct it in my head.
When I write something down, I’m taking an experience, a thought or a feeling and turning it into a story. That means choosing what matters, deciding where something starts and ends, and finding connections between things that might not have seemed connected at the time.
We all know that real life is messy, many of the deliberate omissions, of half-truths I’ve used here are both to protect myself and other, but also because writing tends to tidy these things up a little to make them coherent.
I don’t think it’s a deliberate act, there is no wilful malice a play, it’s just what writing does.
A vague thought becomes a sentence. A difficult feeling becomes a paragraph. Something that happened on Tuesday becomes part of a narrative about me.
And then, twenty years later, I come along and treat that narrative as historical evidence which is perhaps a little unfair to myself.
So, was I performing?
This is where the idea of blogging as performance becomes interesting to me.
I don’t think the answer is simply that blogging is performance, therefore everything I’ve written is fake. But neither can I claim that publication has no effect on what I write.
The person on the page is real.
He’s just framed.
That’s true of everyone, really. We present different versions of ourselves depending on where we are, who we’re with, what we’re doing and what we think is expected of us. The version of me writing this is not necessarily the version of me sitting on the sofa, making coffee, wandering around a supermarket or getting disproportionately annoyed because I’ve forgotten why I’ve walked into a room.
Those people are all me.
But none of them is all of me.
And the more I read my archives, the less convinced I am that there was ever a single, definitive Gordon underneath all of it.
That’s perhaps the bit I’ve been getting wrong.
I’ve been asking whether those old versions were really me, as though there should be one correct answer. As though there was a genuine, authentic Gordon hidden somewhere underneath the layers, and everything else was just noise.
I’m increasingly unconvinced that person exists.
There was me in 2004, annoyed about lettuce and train doors.
There was me thinking about friendship and how people change.
There was me writing about music, my dad, a gay friend and approximately seven other things before remembering the original point.
And there is me writing this now.
Leaving pieces behind
Maybe that’s what my archives have taught me.
It isn’t a definitive record of who I was, more a collection of snapshots of a life being lived and of a person trying to make sense of it while it was happening. Sometimes the result is thoughtful. Sometimes it’s embarrassing. Sometimes it’s a bit of both, with a Han Solo reference thrown in for good measure.
I can’t remember every version of myself I’ve been, and I certainly can’t remember everything I’ve thought or felt. But this blog has kept little pieces of those versions of me alive. From a concern I no longer have, a joke that still makes me laugh, to that idea that, rather annoyingly, I apparently understood twenty years ago and have since had to learn all over again.
Even the things that make me wince have their place, helping to remind me that I wasn’t born knowing what I know now.
My archives don’t prove that I was always the person I am today. Quite the opposite. It shows me how often I’ve been wrong, how often I’ve changed my mind, and how much of me has somehow remained stubbornly familiar throughout all of that.
And now this post goes into the archive too.
One day, I suppose, I’ll find it again. I’ll probably disagree with some of it. I might think parts of it are painfully earnest. I may even wonder why I needed quite so many words to arrive at such a simple idea.
But perhaps I’ll be glad it’s there.
Because for all the things I’ve forgotten, and all the people I’ve been, there is something reassuring about leaving a trail behind me, even it it’s not a perfectly honest record, or a complete one, or even an especially flattering one.
But it is evidence that I was here. Overthinking. Getting things wrong. Trying again.
And, just occasionally, writing it all down.
What are your thoughts?