It has been nearly three years since I first put together a simple static calling-card page and then gradually turned it into a website that could keep running steadily. In those three years, a great deal has happened. I have gone through many things, met many people, and come away with more feelings and realizations than I expected.
Sometimes I look back at what I wrote before and feel a strange kind of self-awareness. More than that, I feel time itself passing through me. I can see clearly what I was thinking on a particular day, in a particular month, in a particular year. It is a very real sense of crossing back into an earlier version of myself.
So why do I write a blog?
If you had asked me when I first started building the site, I probably would have said it was out of curiosity, out of a love of tinkering, out of a desire to explore more and learn more. Those reasons are still there. But now there is another one, and it matters even more: I want to quietly write down the past and preserve the present.
If I open WeChat now, it has been almost a year since I last posted on Moments, and that post was just my college entrance exam admission result. Before that, there had already been a two-year gap. In other words, if I set aside that one update, I have basically not posted on Moments for nearly three years.
Part of it is probably because that space feels restless and false to me. I do not like scrolling through Moments. Everyone presents the brightest, smoothest version of their life there, and watching too much of that rarely brings anything except more anxiety. So I chose to stay away.
After that, I tried using a public account platform. But it never felt as practical as more blog-like platforms such as Weibo or Xiaohongshu. At the same time, I did not want to be swept along by the endless information stream on those apps, and I did not want to go along with it either. Maybe that is just a slightly affected kind of stubborn pride. In the end, I ruled out almost every social platform and settled into entertaining myself in my own corner.
Personal blogs feel like isolated islands of information, drifting across the boundless ocean of the internet. They are simply there. Whether anyone looks at them or not, they remain. They do not become something else just because people pay attention to them, and they do not lose their meaning just because people do not. Even if one day they disappear, there is something about them that still resists regret.
That feeling appeals to me.
A personal site is not as noisy as Moments, not as chaotic as Weibo, not as performative as Xiaohongshu, not as self-important as Zhihu, not as coarse as Tieba, not as vulgar as short-video platforms, and not as constrained as a public account platform. A personal blog is quiet, steady, low-key, restrained. It gives you room to say what you think and feel with real freedom. Aside from the loneliness and solitude that come with it, it is hard to fault. And in a way, is that not exactly the atmosphere that feels missing now?
What looks like collective liveliness is often, underneath it all, individual loneliness. Instead of hiding from that, it may be better to face it directly: to settle into oneself, to be moved by oneself, to evolve by oneself. The satisfaction that comes from that can be greater than the excitement of being lost in a crowd.
I sometimes think that many people who keep personal blogs are probably lonely in one way or another. People who want a private patch of land on their own information island are often not the kind who want to please the current or chase after the flood. At least, that is how it seems to me.
And so I started blogging.
I write down the small details of my life. I write out my thoughts and judgments about life, about being human, about relationships and how people deal with one another. I stay on this little island of information and keep myself company, and there is a distinct pleasure in that.
So why do I write a blog? Because I do not want to be carried away by the tide? Because there is nowhere else I really want to go?
Yes, both are true, but neither is the whole answer.
Maybe some of it comes from sentiment. Maybe some of it comes from the sense of safety that solitude gives me. But one thing is certain: I write in order to record. I still remember that when I bought the Handsome theme for my Typecho blog, the last line of a letter written to users by a friend known as C said:
Please remember, the original purpose of a blog is to record.
I think I will go on recording my life on this blog for a long time. I want to keep documenting the course of my days and the shape of my life. And I hope I can hold on to that original intention and keep walking this long road with my feet on the ground.
I leave these words here as a reminder to myself, and stop here.