One day you’re twenty-eight-year-old young woman sitting in your shitty apartment in Prior Lake smoking cigarettes and tossing HTML For Dummies on the floor and the next you’re a forty-seven-year-old cranky old goat sitting in your house baking celebratory brownies and wondering exactly how the fuck you’ve been blogging for NINETEEN FUCKING YEARS now.

How did this happen?

2019 is the year that math hurts my feelings. I’m still not over the idea that 1989 was thirty years ago and now I Will Dare is nineteen. What kind of bullshit is this? Fucking math.

Every year for the past eighteen years I keep expecting to have some sort of words of wisdom, some smart, well-aged advice about writing or blogging or longevity. I have none. Maybe I need to think about this post for more, well, at all. A lot of the shenanigans here at I Will Dare are written stream-of-consciousness style moments before hitting Publish. I hope this explains all those posts about sandwiches.

If you’re like me, July 2000 isn’t even a foggy memory. It’s just a think that happened because I know days have to happen in order and even if I don’t remember them it doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. I even did some research to find out if anything interesting, aside from the debut of this website happened, nothing did.

Here’s what I learned, July 31, 2000 was a Monday and there have been 6,939 days from that day to today. However, there have been 8,333 posts since that day. Or at least, official posts. There were A LOT LOT LOT LOT LOT of posts I deleted — a lot of about sandwiches and a bunch of cryptoblogging bullshit that even I couldn’t figure out now.

The #1 song on I Will Dare’s Birthday was “It’s Gonna Be Me” by ‘N Sync, which I heard for the very first time today.

Nineteen years.

NINETEEN.

19.

I’ve been blogging for nineteen years. I can’t tell if that makes me super rad or just the biggest loser ever. I still haven’t landed that big Nutter Butters sponsorship I’v been hoping for, which is pretty disappointing. But there’s always next year, right?

Ok, here’s my big lesson from nineteen years of blogging — when you do something you love because you want to the time flies. The years pile up and you don’t even care because this thing brings you joy. Even if nobody reads it or everybody reads it, it doesn’t matter because you don’t do it for readers or for attention or fame.

I do it because I want to. Because it’s fun and it makes me happy. Nineteen years and it still makes me happy. That’s pretty damn good.