•••

One spring evening, back in St.-Petersburg, I started a blog. Twenty years ago today.

I already had a personal website, or rather, I had already had one: by that time I had removed all but the guestbook from it. What I started this time was a personal blog, finally. Everybody already had one, blogging was at its prime, with LiveJournal and other platforms flourishing; now most of those blogs are long forgotten, and some of the platforms no longer exist. My blog has been updated more or less regularly ever since. Today, I’ve been blogging for more than half of my life.

My blog has never had a theme, and has never been meant as a kind of self-presentation either. I simply wrote here about whatever interested me, and wrote down whichever thoughts I felt like sharing. Sometimes I used the blog to simply speak out, sometimes I simply recorded some thoughts I wanted to save. All in all, it has always been a personal blog, a weblog in the original meaning of the word.

Of course, this blog doesn’t reflect everything that happened in my life throught the last twenty years, perhaps, it doesn’t even reflect the most important things. However, both the contents of the blog and the very fact of me keeping working on it attest: for twenty years straight, new and exciting things keep happening in my life, things I want to share not only with the few close people.

This thought is very easy to miss; as the life goes, sometimes it looks like there’s nothing around me but routine or darkness. Having the evidence and the reminder at hand alone makes the twenty years of blogging worth it.

And worth carrying on.