{"id":108863,"date":"2021-10-18T05:12:06","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T09:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=108863"},"modified":"2021-10-18T13:06:38","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T17:06:38","slug":"13-years-say-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=108863","title":{"rendered":"My Blog Is Now 19 Years Old"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"me\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nMy good friend Stevie (he who was my partner-in-crime in driving to Taos and attending the opening of Dean Stockwell’s art show in Taos<\/a>) always remembers that October 18, is my blog-anniversary. I started it on October 18, 2002. An early adapter, before blogging had reached a tipping point. You’d say you had a blog and people would say, “What’s that?” <\/p>\n

Here is the first post<\/a>. I wrote it sitting in Allison’s apartment. It’s hysterical.<\/p>\n

That photo above is from a long long time ago, but it was at the top of my site for years, before I re-designed stuff and took it down. It was taken by Michael, during a production we were acting in<\/a> in Ithaca, New York, and this was on our day off and the cast went wine-tasting in the surrounding countryside. One of the happiest days of my life – for no particular reason, just that everything was perfect. So that’s how I chose to represent myself when I started up this site. If I had to do it all over again, I would not have put a picture of myself on the front page of my blog. It led to some creepy male followers and I was new to blogging (everyone was) and wasn’t sure how to deal with the attention from guys who treated my blog like it was a Match.com profile. <\/p>\n

I started out on Blog-Spot, creating the blog in 5 minutes, crouched over my laptop, sitting in my friend Allison’s apartment. I re-read the early personal entries of my blog (I wrote much more personally back then, as well as tons of current-events-political stuff) and feel almost disorientation at the tone, the difference in my life back then. (There’s a little Archive drop-down over on the right-hand nav.) My nephew Cashel was a small child and he lived in Brooklyn. He is now a college graduate. My sisters weren’t married yet, and hadn’t met their husbands. My brother lived in New York (he now lives in Utah). They have two sons. My father was still with us. I had a day job. (I would lose it post 2008, naturally.) I was acting in shows and taking a great acting class. I was going on wild dates with random people and then I would write about it in detail on my blog. I got caught up in reading some of those stories yesterday and there’s one date in particular<\/a> I swear I do not remember at all. Not one bit of it. Reading that story is like reading a fictional narrative. <\/p>\n

There were a couple of reasons that I sat down and created a blog in 5 minutes. Multiple intersecting reasons. In the wake of 9\/11, which I witnessed and experienced first-hand, I – like many New Yorkers – went into a state of sustained panic that lasted about a year. I still feel it sometimes, when I am downtown. There’s a new building there now. There’s a memorial. But I remember that hole. The smoking hole in the ground, and the empty spot in the sky where those buildings were. I don’t allow politics on my blog anymore. I wrote about politics back then, in those crazy panic-struck days. I barely had an audience outside my family for about a year. My first blog on Blog-spot had no comments. In June of 2003, I bought a domain name, and moved all that stuff over to the new site (losing a lot of content in the process – every upgrade I lost stuff, including comments). <\/p>\n

I had a lot of free-floating anxiety and panic in the wake of the terrorist attack. There is a lot I have blocked out, but it’s all there in those early days of the blog. Bomb threats at work. Anthrax. SARS. Red alerts, orange alerts. Setting up contingency plans if we were attacked again. (We all had the horrible memories of nobody’s cell phones working on September 11th and not being able to find each other.) These were all everyday parts of New Yorkers’ lives. It was almost impossible to avoid the panic. I started a blog in many ways to express some of that, let off steam, and also SHARE, because sharing felt better to me than just writing “another bomb-scare at work today” in my journal. <\/p>\n

Additionally, along with the September 11th impetus, my heart got broken – based on almost nothing – in 2002. But for whatever reason, this one encounter had a long-lasting impact. In 2000, I met a guy at a party, and fell in love at first sight<\/a>. I’m proud of that essay because it actually captures WHY that experience was so profound … but the whole thing is tainted by the aftermath. Meeting that man was a turning point. Nothing was the same afterwards. And it has nothing to do with him. It was all about me, and where I was at. I was weakening already when I met him. My resilience was diminishing, I somehow felt it, but couldn’t seem to stop it. <\/p>\n

In April of 2002, he invited me to his birthday party. Knowing I was playing with fire, I went. To say it was a crazy night would be to totally understate the situation.<\/a> I read that essay now and I want to tell myself DO NOT ATTEND THAT PARTY. But I was reckless and determined to stir shit up. Mission accomplished. The aftermath was so bad that looking back I believe I should have been hospitalized. It was months, MONTHS, of what Keats calls “wakeful anguish,” and a moment of delirium so alarming I almost called 911 on myself. I don’t mind using the term: “I went crazy.” Again, this really didn’t have to do with him specifically. <\/p>\n

It took MONTHS for me to even START to “come down”, and now, looking back, I understand how dangerous my condition actually was. I white-knuckled it. <\/p>\n

By September, 2002, half a year after the party, I started to feel like myself again. I was interested in life again. Illness (which I didn’t even know was illness at the time) subsided, leaving me energized and clear-headed. Combined with the overall panic-high-alert mode in New York post 9\/11, this was the impetus to start up a site.<\/p>\n

That was 19 years ago. I have mixed feelings about all of it. So much avoidable anguish. HOWEVER: In October of 2002, starting up this site was an act of survival, it meant I wanted to speak, and I thought my voice was worth sharing. I had no idea it would end up not only saving my life – at least the important parts of my life, emotional\/intellectual – but also help me find my way into a second meaningful career. I had no idea where it would lead me. I didn’t care. I didn’t start the blog with a theme or an overall plan. I barely wrote about actors or film. Not at first. It was all over the place. <\/p>\n

The political side of my blog got old almost immediately. By 2004, I had<\/em> it with the general TONE in the comments section of my blog from all the political people who squatted there (before social media, you “hung out” on blogs), and I brought the hammer down: No more politics allowed. Y’all are mean and tedious. I lost many readers. Good riddance. Once I started writing mainly about actors (around 2004, 2005), a whole new audience arrived. (To be fair: There are many people who still read me from those early days – you know who you are.) Eventually, film bloggers started linking to me, I started seeking out people blogging about film. It was a much more appropriate crowd for me. Matt Zoller Seitz, a well-known critic, had a blog, The House Next Door, and one random day he reached out to me and asked if I’d like to contribute. Sure! I had no idea he knew who I was. I started writing for them (you can see the links to my stuff under the Writing Tab in the banner, if you like.) I covered the Tribeca Film Festival for House Next Door (my first time “covering” anything), and that’s how I met Keith and Dan, two dear friends. It’s how I met Farran, Odie, Simon, Steven Boone … people who have become lifelong friends. Now I write freelance for all these different outlets, and yes, of course, I work very hard and I write all the time, but I don’t know if it would have happened if I hadn’t started up my site on that beautiful October day in 2002. I’ve kept a journal since I was 11 years old and barely missed a day for damn near 20 years (I only journal periodically now). Writing is an impulse, yes, but it’s also a necessity and a habit. I MUST do it. Now people pay me to do it. But I didn’t HUSTLE to become a film critic. Hell, there wasn’t even a DESIRE. It just … happened that way. I didn’t seek out the film critic world, it sought me out. <\/p>\n

Once I figured out how I wanted to use this place, I was off to the real races. I followed obsessions, tracking them every step of the way, devoting months (years) to Dean Stockwell, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, ELVIS, Supernatural<\/i>. I am filled with humility and gratitude that outlets would PAY me for writing similar things. I wasn’t a newbie in re: writing. I had written a novel, a couple of novellas, an entire book’s worth of personal essays and was trying to get all of it published. I wrote a short one-woman show which I performed all over New York. Through writing personal essays on my blog, I got some bites from agents, and started to work with one. There were many things going on in my writing life besides the blog. <\/p>\n

The blog got me into the practice of writing publicly every day. It was a stabilizing influence, that’s for sure, although I read those early personal entries – in 2002, 2003 … and I can tell I am struggling mightily. The impulse was to express myself and to be as transparent as I felt comfortable being. I didn’t create a “persona.” I had no thought of crafting a “brand”. (I still don’t think that way.) It was a personal endeavor. My father was my most devoted reader in the beginning. I still come across comments from him and they catch my breath in my throat.<\/p>\n

To all who read me: from the beginning, and more recently … thank you for liking what I do enough that you would choose to spend time here. Thank you for commenting. Your comments add to the experience of writing here. It requires moderation on my part, because unmoderated comments sections are terrible. Once I realized how I wanted to do things, and what I would allow\/not allow (I’ve had a couple of stalkers – some were mildly irritating, and one was so outright frightening I involved the cops). I made some mistakes in dealing with these stalker-types, mistakes I will not repeat) – the whole “conversation” part of the blog got easier. Once I realized I did not want to be the head of a democracy, instead I wanted to be a benign dictator, it got easier. The internet is the Wild West. I can’t wait around to see if the Black Hat guy in the middle of the town square is going to shoot to kill. Of course he is. Nip stuff in the bud, immediately. Do it publicly. If they come back aggressively, block and ban. It’s kept this space safe.<\/p>\n

I didn’t mean to write this much.<\/p>\n

Looking back over the last 18 years, that could be my overrriding response as well as my guiding principle. <\/p>\n

I didn’t mean to write this much … <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My good friend Stevie (he who was my partner-in-crime in driving to Taos and attending the opening of Dean Stockwell’s art show in Taos) always remembers that October 18, is my blog-anniversary. I started it on October 18, 2002. An … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108863"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108863"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171453,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108863\/revisions\/171453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}