are you there, world?

In the halcyon days of the blogosphere, when platforms like Open Diary and Blogger first staggered from the primordial sludge of dial-up internet, two simple words came to herald the start of something momentous: ‘Hello world.’

Chosen as a tribute to the fathers of modern computer programming, ‘hello world’ jumped from page to screen, lifted from Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s seminal 1978 textbook, The C Programming Language. ‘Hello world’ is typically the first program a fledgling techie learns to write – and often a string they might use to test if their code actually works. It's also the dummy text that pre-populates every new page on a WordPress site, a friendlier alternative to lorem ipsum.

‘Hello world!’ What a tantalising catch-cry for writers everywhere, those drawn to documenting life by turning it inside out, seduced by the prospect of a makeshift audience who can easily return a shout into the void. Before super users perfected the form and SEO came along and ruined it, this was exactly what blogging promised to do: expedite and democratise publication for anyone with a keyboard handy and access to the internet. Early bloggers even called themselves ‘escribitionists’, brandishing a casual sort of public intimacy now germane to the social media platforms that blow out our screen-time reports.

I was there for it.

My very first blog, circa 2002, was a dispatch named Cosmic Revelations of a Checkout Chick (CROCC, for short), which my older brother helped me code and update using the handful of HTML tags I was capable of deploying back then. Other projects followed as I moved to the Big Smoke, including a LiveJournal whose account name I thought playfully obscure and erudite until I realised it featured an excruciating typo, as well as an ill-fated WordPress site that almost got me sued. (Hello, lawyers.) In my later twenties, I tended a daily lifestyle blog called One Good Thing, which I abandoned in the lead-up to undergoing electroconvulsive therapy in 2013 – a period of my life I simply didn’t wish to record or recall.

And now? Well.

It seems somehow fitting that a blog should represent the redemptive side project of an ageing millennial.

As I was writing CROCC, all the way back in the nascent naughties, I was brand new to the thorny world of work. My casual job as a ‘sales assistant’ at a shitty discount store meant financial emancipation from my parents – despite the laughable pay packet – and a way to overcome my pathological shyness, not that you could do much with either pocket money or confidence in a place like Toowoomba.

There’s some circuitous and cringe-inducing backstory here.

When I finished high school, at the end of 2001, my hometown boasted a clothing store punnily named The Wearhouse. One afternoon, in those sluggish summer weeks following Christmas and New Year, a job provider rang to offer me an interview there. At least, I assumed it was this store, perched on the trendy end of a main street, a store at which I occasionally shopped, full of the mass-produced tank tops and flared jeans so popular at the time. I was oddly excited by the prospect of a retail job – a chance to prove myself as a regular gap-year-taking teen, in step with fashion.

The shop that wanted to interview me, as it turns out, was named The Warehouse (then Sam’s Warehouse, then Silly Solly’s, then Crazy Clark’s in a succession of takeovers): a department-sized discount store in which unnerving garden ornaments mingled with off-brand dishwasher tablets and tins of ‘sprats’, whatever they are, miles (or aisles) from the environment in which I’d cheerfully imagined myself. To understand the weight of this blow, you must also understand the type of kid I was, a kid who’d dismissed the prospect of working as a Christmas casual at MYER some months before because it was clearly several social strata beyond my own.

I look back now, sad and bemused for this girl who was never encouraged to hope for more, despite a top university entrance score and the potential to develop skills that outshone scanning a scratched credit card through a plastic bag so the EFTPOS machine would accept its meagre payment.

Back then, I had no expectations whatsoever that a workplace would do anything else than take a punt on me and pay the minimum wage. I documented my life online via CROCC for two years, nonetheless aware that ‘a rich inner world’ – and a resilent sense of humour – was something that could sustain a person even if their life consisted mainly of shifts at a discount store punctuated by hair-raising driving lessons and a series of unfortunate haircuts.

Fast forward about twenty years, and I still recognise something of myself in that hesitant teen, who eventually moved on to bigger and better things and secured a more glamorous job. (At a supermarket.)

I’m not sure that person would recognise almost-middle-aged me: a part-time academic, part-time editor, recent escapee from the public service. Amber with the husband and the multi-storey townhouse and the hybrid car and the recently cleared HECS debt and the sizeable collection of Doc Martens and the two spoilt cats who shed all over the furniture and demand to be fed the moment a hint of sunlight appears in the dawn sky.

For someone whose imagination once stopped at ‘MYER Christmas casual’, I should be living the dream. If anything will leave you feeling like a failure, though, it’s working in academia, publishing, and government. Or maybe it’s just work, full stop. That sinking feeling on Sunday nights and Monday mornings. Commuting an hour each way. Smiling weakly in the lifts at other haggard employees. Maybe it’s the fridge full of hormone injections from an unsuccessful round of IVF. Perhaps it’s the hot-water bottle and boxes of Panadol Osteo I keep on my work desk to coddle my uncooperative body through the day. The laundry hamper that’s never empty. The dust on the windowsill, the bloodstain that’s never came out of the couch. Mostly, I suspect, it’s my inbox. The constant fear of opening angry missives. Meetings that could be emails. Emails that should be meetings. Student evaluations. Performance reviews. Software ‘environments’. Hot-desking. The way it never ends. Ever. But, once again, a familiar thought keeps drifting through the weary recesses of my mind: You can write yourself out of this.

My blogging life has always pivoted around my work life, including the time I was served a letter, right before a master’s exam, from a law firm accusing me of defaming my former employer. Mostly, it’s been a kind of escapism – another voice or conduit or way of being in the world when work has felt stifling, overwhelming, itchy.

The last time I blogged was during a period of extended sick leave, when I was stricken suddenly by stroke-like symptoms, and the months passed like a freight train as I underwent medical procedure after medical procedure, hospitalisation after hospitalisation, trying to rule out every pernicious neurological condition my doctors could think of: aneurysm, brain tumour, multiple sclerosis, encephalitis, idiopathic intracranial hypertension, functional-neurological disorder, MADNESS, HYSTERIA!!11!!!.

In the end, no news was good news: I was diagnosed with a particularly kooky yet recalcitrant migraine disorder, aggravated by a problem with my inner ear. The panic gradually subsided into despair. So, this was the new normal. Normal sucked. It still does.

But I had something else: time. And with that time came a renewed desire to write. I started pitching pieces to literary journals. I entered competitions. I finished drafts that had been sitting, for years on end, in a folder optimistically labelled WRITING PROJECTS. And I launched another blog.

Maintaining a blog, I should point out, is a fun but time-consuming side hustle. I’ve told students in the past to forgo a blog altogether if they can’t update it regularly. Inactivity or irregularity are the natural enemies of a healthy blog. Why write one, I concluded on my last attempt, if I can write for publication instead?

It’s another few years down the track now – a time that feels vacant yet repetitive to me, as if I’ve been circling at the margins of something else, stuck in some mysterious rotating door of the soul – and I find myself asking: ‘Why always write for publication if I could… just write?’

Nothing feels right unless I write.

So, I’m back at the blank screen, the place I started out, long ago – curiously enamoured of a confessional form that connects writers directly with readers and that offers ways to write without having to consider what’s topical, marketable, sexy. There’s no deadline, no word limit, no invoices, no ‘fit’ to consider except my own.

And it’s slow. It’s something laboured and deliberate when everything else has become so fast – too fast.

Are you there, world?

It’s me, Amber.