Returning to my humble beginnings: Girlblogging

Currently: Tuesday, 9th May 2023, 7.17pm, hair strawberry blonde and still a little damp, in my soft angel cloud bed under a green patchwork quilt in my perfect little London flat, spring rain pelting melodically through windows left half open (I love you, world!)

…Hello.

It’s been a while. I am writing this directly in the posting software of this platform for the first time in a long time, brain to blog. From farm to plate, if you will.

Without checking, I believe I’ve not updated my blog in over a year. It was a passion project, as they all are, an outlet hardly intended for anyones eyes but my own. For majority of the active years, this blog had a very small but rather loyal following, including the publishers of my most recent bestselling book. Life is so funny like that. I abandoned my blog when I began to focus on and more or less devote my entire being to said book. I was advised to not post unpublished poetry and got in my head about it all, deciding that I should prioritise my creative energy elsewhere. I also found that towards the final days of my posting, ‘girlblogging’ had become a whole damned movement, the substack-ification of insane ramblings rebranded as socratic preachings to the delusional, girl to girl, human to human. My precious corner of the internet had been discovered - for which I do consider myself very lucky and also very honoured - but this came with new pressures and demands of thousands of girls now glaring up at me through pixels and blue light like some kind of martyr. When you’re writing for an audience you’re inherently no longer writing for yourself, and I feared I would lose myself, or my ‘voice’, whilst selling my soul to impress strangers on the internet. I’ve always had a flare or the ostentatious, and I’ve always had a flare for the dramatic. The pressure - or was it demand avoidance? - got to me and I quit the drug of girlblogging cold turkey. I still get (unsolicited) monthly stats emailed detailing the performance of my three year old blog posts, still thousands of new views a day - the pressure still ceases to dissolve or at the very least subside. The only difference is I’m entering this new phase (probably self destructive, you should see the rest of my life) where I find the exhibitionism of it all impossibly motivating and a little thrilling and also kind of hot.

In honour of my humble beginnings, I will try (I repeat: try) to use this space how I’d always intended: a diary. An outlet. An unpublished book. A collection of memories. A curation of moments. A list of everything I have ever liked, loved, and run from. A vessel. A beast. A lie. A truth.

All that aside, now living on the other side of the world and 1.5 published books deep, I’m finding my love for no-strings-attached art again. Between writing, editing and performing I have been seeking an outlet for what I refer to as my silly writing. You know, the not so serious stuff. The stuff I can’t eventually commodify because it’s pointless and probably a little vulgar.

I could catch you up on where I’ve been, but you probably don’t care, and quite frankly, neither do I. Everything has changed, but also nothing - at the end of the day, I am still just a girl in her bedroom writing morbid poetry about my gut wrenching mummy issues coupled with failed almost loves in my journal, sandwiched between to-do lists and recordings of which foods make my tummy hurt the most. Mummy, tummy. I am so brain-rotted from studying creative writing that I even must rhyme for, well, whatever the hell this is. A vessel. A beast. A lie. A truth.

This is not me announcing my return to girlblogging - this is me checking in, saying hello, how are you, I might hang around for a while, I’m not sure, I can’t promise anything, my commitment issues run a little deeper than I thought.

I am: bed crumbs, wine stained teeth, a paroxysm of sentiment and rage measured simply by ink on parchment.

I am not: good at keeping promises.

Anyway, I’ve decided I’m not a terrible human. I’ve also realised I’m not a wonderful human, either. I am exactly that, a human, and I will keep lying and taking my coffee black and burning my tongue on the mug and abandoning projects and saying I love you during sex because I can’t help it when I look into somebodies eyes like that, even if I don’t mean it, but what does it mean to not mean something you also kind of mean or at least really fucking want to mean and what the hell does love even mean anyway?

I’ll see you around. Maybe. No promises.

Love always,

Lady Dakota (formerly known as Nowhere Girl)