When I had found myself not posting much on Xanga (The site where I had blogged prior to this) I felt two types of feeling- a relief that it means that the “depressed” Ekin has left and that a chapter in my life can close. While I’m not sure whether or not I would return to Xanga, I’ve more or less abandoned the site to blog fully onto this site.
When I had first started blogging it was back in 2001. Everything was put up onto the web manually and it was a very tedious process. It wasn’t until I discovered Xanga where I was able to blog without the restraints of editing HTML pages and uploading them onto a server. After using Xanga for a while, I found myself addicted to the community it had. The fact that my voice was heard from different people around the world, my joy day-to-day had become reading blogs and finding comments left on my blog entries. Through Xanga I had found close friends as well as a boyfriend, but alas distance proved to be quite the enemy and all those things crumbled once natural human emotions had come forth. I started withdrawing from Xanga and not wanting to freely surf the Xanga community for fear of virtually “bumping” into the very people that I had used to be close with.
Fast forward to now, the Xanga community has changed much. Many of the bloggers that I had read either have stopped blogging or have closed their accounts. My entries no longer yield much comments and I no longer see the fun in surfing into “strangers” blogs anymore.
Most importantly, I’ve decided to leave Xanga to reclaim my voice back. With over 100 subscribers reading my contents, I find myself censoring a lot of what I really want to say. I no longer wrote candidly for fear of offending or depressing someone or not “entertaining” my loyal blog readers.
No more.
I want to be heard.
… and I want to be heard by you.
Photo: Taken in Thailand in front of MBK
Wow, I think this blog really captures a lot of my feelings I’ve been thinking about. Believe it or not, I think it was a year ago or so that I stumbled upon one of your Xanga entries which somehow led me to this site and it inspired me to create my own website. I finally started consolidating all my posts from various blog sites throughout the years (since 2001) and put it in one place. I only have about 2 readers currently, but even so, I’m starting to think what happens if the number of readers increase. Would I be able to openly write what I feel, or will my writing become vague in order to censor private thoughts I might not want certain people to read.