To the Me Who Started This Blog Eight Years Ago

Everyone always says, “I never expected to be where I am now,” but the sentiment really hits different this year.

When I first started I.E. Jessie in 2012, I was in the second semester of my first year at university. Blogs were taking off, especially fashion ones (remember lookbook.nu?) — platforms like Tumblr and Blogspot were in their prime. Instagram was around but nowhere close to the monster it was today.

This blog didn’t launch me into influencer territory — far from it — but maybe that’s the catch. Back then, that wasn’t the goal at all.

My blog has shed its skin over and over too. Platform-wise, I jumped from Blogger to Wordpress to Squarespace. Content-wise, posts skewed from documenting outfits to memories, to more often than not, rambles about whatever happened to be taking up mind-space at the time. In recent years, the blog has taken a back seat to what could be deemed as a ‘professional website’, a tool to establish ‘online presence’ and credibility. Throughout it all, it’s been my little corner of the Internet.

Even now, I still think “i.e.jessie” is kind of unwieldy as a name (at some point I changed it to lowercase) but “iejessie” has stuck as my online moniker, regardless. I used to have a long explanation about the “i.e.” at the beginning too (part acronym, part Latin abbreviation) but these days, I’m happy with it just being a repetition of the last two letters of my name.

I’ve toyed with the idea of picking this blog back up time and time again — but maybe somewhere along the way I sort of lost my reason for why I had it in the first place. After all, I’m nowhere (?) near who I was in 2012, so it’s to be expected that the way I think about things has changed as well. I had this jotted down when I first started piecing this post together a month ago:

Back to blogging — back to the beginning

What do you do when you have more ideas than you know what to do with?

I struggle with this a lot because obviously I want my ideas to be good ones — either in conception or execution but the paradox of being a creative (or just a human) is that that just isn’t possible all of the time. So I’ve given it some thought and these are the three things I’ve come up with:

1. write it out — this usually takes the form of messy jotted notes in my journal. Ideas need room to breathe, and in that same vein, I also need to capture these slippery, ephemeral thoughts in words to make them tangible.

2. become semi-paralyzed by all the options (i.e. choice paralysis) — realizing that I have a lot of ideas, but a) not all of them are great and/or feasible, and b) I don’t have the capacity for all of them. It is what it is.

and 3. choose one and run with it — you never know what something could be until you take the time. And you can’t start over anew until you’ve started something to begin with. For current intents and purposes, this looks like going back to the beginning. Simplifying — and not over-thinking! — it, whatever it is.

I’ve been so focused this year on freelancing, on learning new things, exploring different possible income streams and creative outlets — it literally didn’t occur to me until recently that I still have a blog that I can do something with.

I started this blog the better part of a decade ago. I don’t think I could’ve guessed back then that I’d be freelancing or pursuing creative projects or working in social media — actually, it’d be more accurate to say I had no idea what I would be doing in eight years’ time. But then again, do any of us, really? You can plan and dream, but no one can predict the future, after all.

I never really gave much thought to whether I’d still be blogging then (er, now) but seeing as I’ve put in some semblance of effort throughout the years, maintaining a website, posting here and there (I have more unfinished drafts than published ones over the past few years, I admit) — I guess there’s no better time than the present to return to where I started. I wanted to write, express, and share and this is me reminding myself that I have this space—my space—to do that online, should I wish it.

So I guess, to my 2012 self, I say: “thank you.” You did good. 🤍