This is my second blog. The first, I started 22 years ago.
It was a mix of flyers for parties in dingy basements, ultra compressed mp3 clips, assorted music lyrics and the ramblings of a goth kid that thought himself an authority on Nietzsche. On good days I had about 10 daily visitors.
It was wild. We had no themes, no one to copy, no common sense. Everything was done by hand, with no easy way to share or promote your stuff. With no social networks, we had to rely on actual (ok, virtual) social connections to get new visitors. I remember spending hours every night in MIRC chat rooms talking to strangers until they weren’t, eventually adding a link to their blogs to my blogroll; they would of course do the same.
A small number of those original bloggers would eventually grow into online behemoths, some even moving into traditional media. Most, including me, would get bored a few months later and fade into obscurity.
Dousing the Spark
I reminisce of this without a hint of bitterness. My only regret is not having a backup (some of the things I did with that blog’s css were truly wild, although I think I’d be cringing a lot reading my adolescent ramblings…). Remembering this, however, was crucial in understanding how much I sabotaged my creative self through the years. And how I could stop doing so.
I started a blog before the year 2000… I was sharing beats and remixes made on my crappy PC long before Soundcloud even existed. Publishing short stories and poems in the first online magazines. Yet it never really got anywhere. The moment I got a hint of success, I also got a hint of the hard work I’d need to maintain and grow that success. Then would come the anxiety, the depression, the denial.
I ended up studying business at Uni, joining a bank and working on one of the most stereotypically boring careers possible. Sometimes dabbling in artistic hobbies like music or photography, but never able to truly express myself like before. Something was holding me, a messy bundle of anxieties, traumas and pressures that was just too hard to disentangle.
But (sometimes barely) I kept functioning. And as I got older and slightly higher up the corporate ladder, I got more money, more vacation days. I had no debt, no kids, no wife. No passion. So I decided to travel. Check those marks while I was still young, I thought. And it saved me.
Found in Translation
Alone in a different country, I learned I could be a different person; or rather, my own person. Abroad, I was Peter the writer, the poet, the photographer. I would walk all day looking for the perfect photo, to then spend all night in a moody coffee shop handwriting my next “masterpiece”.
It sounds affected, I know. But it was a realization that saved my life. That changed my life.
Those trips, particularly to Japan, with which I completely fell in love, rescued that young, spirited soul that I thought long gone. They were my therapy.
Coming back to work was always a bad trip, the post vacation blues even stronger than usual. But I started noticing a difference. People started noticing a difference. I was becoming more sociable, personable, even fashionable. And when the effects tapered off, I’d just go on another trip and refresh myself.
The secret was to always go alone. To always be free to be myself. Any myself I wanted.
It worked so well, I did something I never really considered before. One time, I came back married.
(continues in Part II)