Dipping a Toe Back in the Waters

I often say that I have no memory, but that can’t be true.  I don’t know to what extent a poor memory is deliberate, as there are certain memory lanes that I just refuse to walk down, while at the same time there are places I only live in memory and dreams. I have never had any way of structuring memories as I don’t write letters or many emails and don’t keep a journal. That was so, until recently, when I found a beautiful way to capture the immediate past.

A few months before we moved to Manila, for what was to be a 4 year stay, I started writing the blog East West and Upside Down. At the time, I didn’t really pay much attention to blogs, but a couple of twenty-somethings in my office suggested I start a blog as a way to keep in touch. So I did, and it’s been great.

From the start I saw the blog as a way of writing letters to people, of staying in touch, albeit pretty one-sided. It was never meant to be for a big audience of strangers. Way back in the day, when we first moved overseas to Jamaica, I wrote lots and lots of letters - and also kept copies of them, which served me as a journal of sorts. No intertube in those days. How much more efficient it is now, I thought, to put my tales and photos and cartoons and eye candy in one place, online, accessible to whoever wants to check in with what I’m doing. But the blog turned out to be much more than that. It turned out to be a personal place of memory, a place for me to go and reminisce and smile and more often than not laugh out loud. Clearly I was writing for myself, a most appreciative audience.

Then one day last month it was gone. Vanished. My entire Google account became disabled and my blogs were gone - inaccessible. I had no access to my stuff and couldn’t get a response from Google despite sending numerous emails. Turns out there is no there there. When Google says “Contact us” on a page, what it really means is contact our automated system, which will send some kind of automatic reply - or not. Being locked out was devastating and the thought of losing those 4 years of captured Asian memories in particular was incredibly painful. It felt like a virtual house fire where a room has been demolished, the one that held the very personal albums. Although the blogs were open in theory to the world, they could not be found with search engines, and so remained a place where my friends and sometimes friends of friends would read my “letters to them”. Writing them became a great source of entertainment for me and I’d sometimes go back and reread different stories, which would bring back all kinds of memories. It was also a way for me to sort through the hundreds of pictures I took on my travels to find the ones that told the story.

Google owns Blogger as well as Picasa, which is where all my uploaded images that get inserted in the blog are stored. It also owns YouTube. When the account was disabled everything was gone, including my newsreader, Feedly, which is fed through Google Reader, like everything else it seems. During the time I was trying to get my account reinstated I saw from the forums that this seems to happen a lot for one reason or another and that when it does, everyone becomes frantic - you can hear the howls of despair leaping off the screen. During the time without my account, without access to my own work, despair was a pretty good description of how I felt, especially as the days passed and it started to look like I may have lost it forever. 

The desire to write and take pictures and play with eye candy and jokes has not left me, nor the wish to preserve memories, but for now, I’m very reluctant to plunge back in with my previous “host”. I’ve been looking at other options but haven't yet found the energy to start all over again.

I seem to have lost my blogging mojo.