The person I thought I was

I occasionally read my own blog. I’m not sure why. It’s either a perfectly reasonable act of reflection or a deeply questionable way to spend an afternoon. There are few things quite like stumbling across something you wrote twenty-two years ago and thinking, with genuine confusion, who the fuck was that? The annoying thing is that I know who it was. There are my words, sitting there on the screen, confidently explaining what I thought, what I believed, what annoyed me, what mattered to me. The certainty is sometimes quite impressive. I don’t remember ever being that certain, about anything. The evidence in front of my eyes suggests otherwise. The written version of me I’ve been thinking about this partly because of a couple of recent posts I read which mentioned blogging as form of performance. The argument, broadly speaking, is that the moment you put something in public you are, in some sense, performing. There is an audience to play for, even if that audience is only three people,…