I have been writing on the internet for as long as I can remember and can’t seem to do it anymore

Pick nearly any point in my life and it will have included me writing on the Internet. My friends and I were writing about our lives (primarily for each other) on xanga before we even started high school which means we were 11 or 12. I can’t imagine now what I was saying, I only know that I was.

On MySpace I wrote a lot of vaguely fictionalized vignettes related to things going on in my life. I tried to write my first novel, posting a chapter at a time.

After MySpace came many blogging platforms. I wrote personal essays. GIF filled critiques of things other people said online. Essays about the problematic. Fiction and poems. Pop culture writing.

I have published stupid things and I have published things I felt proud of years later. I have lost track of hundreds of thousands of words, sent off into the mysterious abyss of the internet.

I wonder now how I did it, because I can’t seem to anymore. I have at least a dozen abandoned pieces from this year (including a 75% finished essay questioning recommendation culture on the internet). When it comes down to it, none of the things I’ve been writing feel worth posting on the internet. I think maybe I don’t know how to exist on the internet anymore. I can’t locate myself in a place that used to feel like home.

I don’t know what that means. At first I thought that it was a matter of angles and intentions—that I wasn’t sure what I was trying to do online and I just had to shift things around until I figured it out. But now I’m not sure that’s the case. It feels, at the moment, that no angle will ever feel quite right.

It sounds so dramatic, saying that. But it’s how I feel, even if the reality of that embarrasses me.

I have been writing on the internet for as long as I can remember, and I don’t know how to do it anymore.