The Many Lives Of Sati Marie Frost

I have been blogging for fourteen years.

In case you think you read that wrong, I'll repeat: I have been blogging for fourteen years. I started keeping an online journal when I was thirteen, at the beginning of 1997, way before anyone was using the word blog. The internet was new(ish). Ask Jeeves was the premier search engine and Google hadn't been invented, or at least wasn't widely available (I don't know exactly when it was invented - history of the internet is not something I've studied). Social networks were barely even thought of, and chatrooms and email were the primary ways to keep in touch with people. My first email account wasn't even a proper online one, it was one where you dialed up a connection and then the modem allowed you online for a few minutes while it retrieved the messages, and then you could read them offline.

Nobody I knew had the internet aside from my stepfather, who built computers. I was the first kid in my high school class of 80-odd to have an email address of my own. But twice a week after school, when I was in eighth and ninth grade, I would walk to my stepfather's house and use Microsoft Works to write a journal entry detailing what had happened that week, and my feelings about things. And then I would dial up an internet connection, and log onto Yahoo and copy-paste my journal entry to my Yahoo Geocities page. And then I'd email the page number (you couldn't choose a domain name back then) to my friends' fathers' email addresses, with "PRIVATE: FOR {FRIEND'S} EYES ONLY" in the subject bar. Occasionally I'd use the teen chatrooms, and meet people in there, and I'd give them the address. And I had a link to it in my Yahoo profile, too. So I slowly built up a readership, some of whom I still talk to today. The page didn't allow for comments, so all comments came in the form of email. But they did come. And I still have a handful of online friends, from America and Australia, to whom I can say, hey, remember when? and they will.

I got my first home internet connection when I was 15, and it was a dial-up, pay-per-minute service. I didn't know how much they would charge until my mother called me into the kitchen to ask me why that month's phone bill was over £200 (maybe $300) when it usually ran to £10-15. I worked at the local university all summer to pay off that bill. And discovered the wonders of a computer lab that was always open and didn't charge staff to use the internet, LOL.

My blog has seen many different incarnations: from the original Geocities page, to a LiveJournal page that I updated once every few months, to a Kiwibox journal that I used only for things that I wanted kept private from friends, to a long-running Bolt journal (I spent most of my internet time in my teens, from 1997 through to 2001, on Bolt) that I wrote in frequently, to my college blog that I ran as ambassador for my entire college, to a collection of notes on my Facebook page, and now to AFF, and to here.

I've given you this piece of history to explain this: I am tired. Fourteen years, more than half my lifetime, I have lived a public life, with my heart open and my feelings and actions, at least a large portion of them, on display.

I am tired.

I've been reading a lot of posts lately where friends have talked about their blogging careers. They talk about the last year, or last couple of years, and I think, really? Has it only been that long? But at the same time I can understand how it can feel like a lifetime, because people like Bubbles and LuLu and Smarty have said and done more of substance in their year, or two years, or four years, than I have in my fourteen.

I am not leaving. I doubt I will ever leave the blog world completely, and when the time comes to move on from this site, I hope that all of my dear readers will come and visit me in my next incarnation. But I am slowing down a bit. The kind of fatigue and apathy that I've been feeling for the last X months is warning me that something's wrong, and something needs to change.

My choice to slow down, and see if I wish to fade out, is not due to the venom that I see on here daily. There are times when it makes me angry, but more often I simply find myself shaking my head in amazement that adults in their forties and fifties still haven't learned the simple truth that I already knew at seventeen: things change. Lives change, worlds turn. People rise to the tops of lists, and then fall into obscurity. A small handful of people stick with you throughout your life, and the rest fall away. You can try and jam the door shut, stop the world from moving along, or you can take a deep breath and accept the fact that nothing lasts forever, and be happy with the knowledge that you touched people's lives. Now is wonderful, and later will be wonderful too, but it will not be the same.

One day, I hope to make a site with all of my posts, from all of my incarnations. I was never a person who trusted to technology, and because of this I have paper copies of them; ten or twelve books full of memories of my life. A few have gotten lost along the way, but the majority are there. So one day, perhaps you will be able to read about the entire life, or near enough, of one average, albeit slightly odd, girl.

For now, I will be here. Just, not as much of me as you used to see.

I feel like I should have some profound ending to this note, something that causes music to play and lights to fade out dramatically. I don't have anything. I am used up. So all I will say is this: you touched my life. All of you who commented here, all of you who read me anywhere else. And I leave a piece of my heart with each one of you.

I love you.