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Friday, July 1, 2005

One Year Ago Today

One year ago today I officially launched OpenDoors. It took two weeks, “hours of planning and perpetually sore eyes” (as I wrote in the very first entry) to figure out this blog thing and develop a halfway decent site, but I did it because I was bored and needed to bury myself in some sort of work while recovering from some difficult times.

Web design and graphic design is therapeutic in a way, a matter of methodically tweaking elements and trying new things until the result is something you find satisfying and just the way you picture it. For me it’s a relief to the rest of life, which sometimes is not the way I think it should be.

I also started OpenDoors because I wanted to say something, to feel like I was doing at least some small thing to help someone — even if that someone was myself. One of the first entries (“Is That So Radical?”) attempts to explain that desire.

I’ve been continually surprised to find out who reads this blog. Sometimes I find out in conversations with people when they comment on a part of my life I know I haven’t discussed with them.

“How did you know about that?” I ask.

“Oh, I read your blog all the time,” they respond.

And then I have to review all I’ve written to make sure I didn’t write anything bad (or overly good) about them.

At other times I hear from visitors through unexpected e-mails. They’ve come from childhood friends, distant family members, college classmates and many other places.

Sometimes these e-mails say things like “I heard you turned gay and I had to find out.” At other times they say things like “I’m 16 years old and I’m living in a small town without anyone to talk to; thanks for your site.”

Sometimes hearing from unexpected readers makes me long for anonymity. Knowing what to write and what to keep to oneself is, I think, any blogger’s curse. I sometimes regret that this site has caused additional, shall-we-say “complexities” in the lives of those who care for me.Occasionally I’ve gotten nasty anonymous comments from people who feel I run this site only to hurt my family. Believe me, sometimes I wish I shared less. But, as I’ve said before, that is both selfish and scared. Neither trait I wish to describe me.

Of course, there are also times when this blog has opened good dialogues or I hear from readers and it makes it all worth it. Here is one example from a college student who grew up very near me in rural Michigan. Last week I received an e-mail from a teenager in Belgium who thanked me for writing.

Things change in a year. Whereas I used to carefully craft blog entries with the image of my college writing professor hovering over my shoulder, these days I sometimes feel I’m barely putting any thought into helloaaron.com. The problem is that life gets in the way, and I’m not sorry for that. It’s the way it should be.

But many things also remain the same a year later. I still often feel disconnected from peers (as you can read here), followed by moments of intense connection (here and here). I’m still single (though I wasn’t for a few months), and I still find myself looking for that “other” person, though I know I shouldn’t. I’m still pursuing a career, but today I’m much happier with my current job than I was a year ago.

What do I expect in the coming year? I don’t honestly know, nor do I put that much thought into it. What happens will happen, and I look forward to it. But what can you expect from helloaaron.com? I think the time is right for some changes here. Maybe some new subjects, as the old ones are getting tired. Maybe a new design. Maybe, because I’m getting tired of writing about my own life, you’ll wake up to find some fiction here.

At any rate, thanks for checking into helloaaron.com. I hope you’ve found some value in it. Happy blogiversary to me.

Posted by Aaron on July 1, 2005 10:51 AM