Warning: Brief refs to Depression and trauma
I've been going through a lot of my old blogposts lately.
It's both an attempt to defeat the forces of entropy...
...and to possibly get back onto Google Adsense (it's a whole thing, I talked about it a few months back, so check that post out here if you're interested.)
And... it's been interesting.
Like, genuinely interesting - way more than I thought it would be.
Basically, I was not aware of the sheer volume of stuff I have written over the course of the last 11 years - it's a lot. (Lol.)
And a lot of the things that I've written are a lot better than I remember.
(...which is probably once again proof that I'm my own worst critic 😅)
My posts are rarely as cringey as I remember - although I recommend not looking at anything as far back as 2014-2015 because... wow. The cringe is real, and I did not know what I was doing.
...But in defence of 14-15 Cee, she was trying to dig her way out of a very dark Depression period. 2026 Cee can only remember bits and pieces of back then because trauma (yay.)
One not-great thing, though, is seeing how many links to friends' blogs are now either dead links or else lead to blogs with no updates in years.
There's a massive churn in blogging, book blogging, and general internet prescence
- you build up a friendship with someone and after a while... they're just gone. You just don't see or hear from them any more.
Only a few of the friends I made online betweeen 2014 and 2018 are still around and in contact with me.
While I don't see online friendships in the same way as I see offline friendships
- not that they're lesser in any way, they're just a different kind of friendship that's more akin to ye olde fashioned pen-friends -
it still hurts to lose contact with people that I used to speak to every single day.
Even more than that - it sucks that many aspiring authors and bloggers have been unable to hold onto their passion and dreams for either writing, blogging, or both.
The churn makes me sad, basically.
Of course, all this nostalgia is one thing - but I've been actually, y'know, updating things.
Which when you're dealing with over 1.8k posts (yes... that is how many posts have been posted right here on Dora Reads - it's wild,) takes a lot of work,
So, having finally learned my lesson (I hope,) about trying to do too much at once and exhausting myself and damaging my health in the process, I've been taking my own advice on-board for once, and doing just a little bit at a time.
A little at a time is always the way to go, tbh.
There is much less stress when you break things down to the next teeny-tiny task to complete.
And - and this is ground-breaking - IT'S OK.
It's OK for me to update a post multiple times over a few days because I just don't have the time/energy/bandwidth to do it all at once.
So yeah, you may come across posts which are half-updated and/or generally messy. They've been up for ten years, they can take a couple of days or weeks of a mid-renovation aesthetic (lol.)
I'm sure to a lot of people, the way in which I'm updating things appears to be pretty random.
I'm not following any form of chronological system. I'm also not taking a group of posts - like Nerd Church or Comics Wrap-Up, for example - and updating them all as a category.
But it makes sense to me.
Because the order in which I'm updating things is methodical. But... it's a different kind of method to what most people would come up with.
My brain's methodical is different to everyone else's methodical - instead of grids and lists, it's more like weaving cloth, or a spider's web.
And instead of fighting that, I've decided to (finally) embrace it.
So instead of following the systems that most people would put in place (I tried a spreadsheet for blogpost-updating several years back... it did not end well,) I'm following my brain's own systems, instead.
I'm following the interconnectedness of my blogposts
- the way they interlink (often literally - they're web pages after all,) and bounce off each other, the way they take the same themes and concepts and play with them.
(Ironically, that's the way that most web-crawlers and AIs would see them too - I'm out here playing with the neural network, lol.)
I've really been enjoying the way my blogposts move with each other, and the way I can alter bits 'n' pieces here and there to help guide that movement.
And... that's the beauty of a blog, I think. It's alive.
Not in a Frankenstein way, of course
- but in the way that literature and books generally are alive, in the way that art is alive, in the way that fanfiction (one of the best examples,) is alive - this winding and binding of thoughts and feelings with a constant movement to them.
The way that words develop their own power, their own magic, by being repeated and edited and altered and played with and cut and erased and expanded and explored throughout the entirety of humanity's relationship with culture and with ourselves...
...It's beautiful.
And I know it sound pretty 'out there,' but it's amazing, all the same.
And it's beautiful.
And somehow, over the last eleven years, Dora Reads has claimed just a little bit of that spirit, that beauty, for itself.
So forgive me for romanticising things a bit; someone's got to do it 😉😅
The next Nerd Church will be on Sunday 5th April 2026 - hope to see you there!
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