If you haven’t heard of the #10YearChallenge circulating social media, let alone participated in it, you’re perhaps living under a rock. If that’s the case, I forgive you and will tell you that the challenge consists of finding a photo of yourself from 10 years ago and comparing it to a selfie today. (Because let’s face it, 10 years ago holding a camera out at arm’s length & hoping you got a good shot wasn’t called a selfie.)
I jumped on board and did the photo challenge on Instagram, but the other day I was kindly reminded by my Facebook memories that 10 years ago I had also started a blog! I’m not entirely sure if I had ever shared the reason why I started blogging, so I thought I’d start up the #10YearBloggingChallenge.
Ten years ago I was in my final semester of journalism school(!), and for my online journalism class we were given a list of projects would could start for marks. One was a blog, there were no real restrictions as to what it had to be about, so as a result, Kara’s View was created! The URL has been expired for quite some time, but if I recall I blogged about issues on campus, borrowing from the articles I wrote for the student newspaper.
After the course finished, the blog died and I figured that was the end of it, until the summer of 2009 when I started a new blog and slowly starting writing again. I’m not 100% sure what inspired me to start up again (according to my first post I wasn’t feeling it at all), but I do recall that I was perhaps inspired by my job since I wrote a weekly column. I named the blog Chatter and according to the hold header I found in the archives, it was a little random:
I think at one point I changed the tagline to “A Bit of Everything and a lot of Nothing,” but really, that’s all the blog was until bigger life events started happening. (Marriage, babies, etc.) Then in 2014 I “rebranded” again and ta-da, She Writes Words was born! While my post frequency has really died down over the past few months, I still find a lot of pleasure in blogging/writing, even if it is just a life update. I think it’s mainly because I know that somewhere out there, someone is sharing the same experiences as I am and can relate to what I’m going through – or at least that’s what I feel when I read other blogs – so I’m happy to keep plugging along here.
Will I be around in another 10 years? It’s really hard to say since life throws so many different things your way, but I’m happy that a lot of you have stuck around for so long.
She Writes Words 