I am not great with math, but I think the 24th of April this little blog ‘o mine turned fifteen years! Yes, 15 YEARS. If nothing else, you must admit I am tenacious and persistent. I just won’t be easily dispelled.

Some years I have done blogged and done bigger celebrations about the “blog’s birthday” (#blogoversary), other years I forgot all about it. And even though the real date for the Blogoversary has passed with a few days, I feel I just can’t let the moment totally pass without acknowledge the importance of it in some way.

So here we are…

Happy Blogoversary to me

Firstly let me quote myself, from blogoversary 10, on why I love blogging:

Because I love writing, photography, photo editing, documenting and exploring creativity, blogging has proven to be the perfect thing for me and my personality.

I was born a blogger, even before blogging existed!

You can start a good blog just by sharing one picture each day, or by writing long articles even without sharing any images (yes you can because I have seen it happen), there are many ways of blogging. The ones that succeed finds out what makes them happy, and keep doing it. The combination of all of these things is what I love most. So, day after day, I find new ways to do it.

I haven’t been around a lot on my blog (or anywhere online) these past months, but I’m still alive here. And I still think that blogs are the best thing on the internet…

Blogging has been very important in my life, although I have been thinking a lot about quitting blogging over the past years. It’s not as hip and cool any more. In fact, it’s been declining for many years. As is the blog reading frequency, commenting, linking to other bloggers, sharing content by people and not just memes, and getting to know someone through anything longer than a tweet or a FB update. And FB updates are often not even written by the person posting them, but “shared” from unknown sources. Ugh!

A lot of experts say that blogging in fact, is already dead.

Maybe the darling peeps (you guys) still reading blogs are as stubborn and crazy as I am writing this? Continuing editing photos, uploading, tweeting, sharing, and writing content even when I know non of my real life friends read it, when nobody in my family cares to continue to check in and when it sometimes pressing “POST” ends up being answered only by the empty, hollow echo of nothing. Sorry to be a downer, but thinking about the past 15 years reminds me that it has not just been easy-breezy and sunshine days.

Most of my blogging colleagues has since long stopped writing on their blogs, and I miss them all still. I sometimes feel very foolish for continuing. I wanted this to become a job, to monetize a few things and make it my job. But I couldn’t make it happen for me, and it costs more than it ever made in income.

But weren’t we going to celebrate around here? Hmmm…

At least, let them eat cake!

April is also my own birthday month, and the cake above as well as the beautiful tulips, are from my birthday. Lately I’ve been in a creative rut or maybe it’s a life rut, I don’t know. so I am not feeling like I can write a lot about how wonderful blogging is today. Hence the quote from how I felt five years ago, and the retrospective of things lost and gone.

But I do remember that blogging has meant a lot to me through the years, and I just can’t give it up yet. It’s been an integral part of my creative life, a catalysis and a place for memory keeping. It’s given me room to ask questions, to share photos, to be me seen (or read) among people who gets me. I think that is a rare thing in life.

About blogging

I’ll just finish up this blog post with another iHanna quote, from the 2009 blog post Creativity is a Habit that needs your YES:

[Blogging] helps keep up the creative habit for me. I blog about what I create, so that writing and sharing keeps me accountable for continuing to be creative. What once started as an experiment has become the thing that keeps me true to the creative habit.

The blog wants posts and therefor I need to think about the projects I start – and finish them so that I have something to share.

I still believe everyone is creative, and that creativity in what ever form it comes, will benefit you greatly. Because creating has been and is my life-line many times, and I wish for everyone struggling with living on this earth to find that for themselves.

Keep reading iHanna

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Happy spring dear ones!