a small victory

the history of my blog upon its end

It’s May 2001. I’m in my 30s, divorced with two small children, in a relationship with a guy half my age. I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I work in the local courthouse - a job I would keep for 25 years - but I feel bored and stagnated and not at all happy. I spend a lot of time online, mostly on AOL, hanging in chat rooms and message boards. I am a prime candidate for this new thing called blogs.

On May 15 at almost 8:30 in the evening, I hit publish on my first rudimentary website. It’s called A Fire Inside, a name I take from the band AFI. I add a Faith No More tagline and I’m in business.

I write a little about the Yankees and call it a night. My blogging career has started. Little did I know what was to come. I slowly gain a small audience by reading and linking to other bloggers, who reciprocate. There is no social media; every connection you make online, every person you go to read your blog, is done by word of mouth taking form as networking through message boards and chat rooms. It is 2001 and blogging is a phenomenon.

I gained enough followers by that summer that I was spending a lot of time on my blog. I wrote at work, I wrote in the early hours and late nights. I read dozens of blogs each day, clicking links that took me to other blogs to discover. We bloggers were forming something akin to a community. It was heady times for the internet and I was fully submerged in it. I started thinking of other things I could do with that blog and at the end of August I started the Banned Books Project, which was pretty successful. I bought the domain asmallvictory dot net (another Faith No More reference) and created a more robust, dynamic blog. I wanted to take this far. I felt like blogging was my gateway into becoming a real writer.

Things on my blog were going smoothly, even if my life wasn’t. Sometime around the end of August I started to have panic attacks again - they had stopped for awhile - and I had this underlying feeling of dread, like my mental health was taking a dive. Blogging sort of helped me through that. I wrote my way around my worries and troubles, getting all my anxieties out of my system. Everything would be ok, I thought.

Well, if you are following the timeline, you know what happened next. September 11 2001 is what happened. I was at work, working on my blog, of course. Sometimes I would get in a little early and get some writing done before everyone got in. This particular day I was concerned that my timestamps were incorrect. It was my biggest problem at the moment. And then everything changed.

During the next few days, as I furiously typed into the Greymatter CMS, my blog became somewhat of a lightning rod. I was relaying information from my father, a former NYFD member who still had old colleagues working in the department. I was writing word from my cousin Stan, also NYFD, who was at the site for most of his waking hours. I wrote passionately and prolifically, and soon I was being interviewed by local news, and linked to by the likes of CNN. It should have been exciting but, given the circumstances, caused me a lot of anxiety.

I was watching CNN 24/7, it seemed. I barely slept. I was wired and distraught and scared for our country. I blogged through it. The panic attacks started coming more frequently. By early October, I was living in a constant state of anxiety. I think all the mental anguish I felt since my separation from my husband in 1996 and subsequent divorce in 1998 that had been dormant was now shaken loose. It was like 9/11 triggered a landslide of bad feelings in my head. I was mentally unwell.

I kept blogging. My site was getting more and more popular and I was driven to produce a ridiculous amount of content. I was deeply unhappy, angry at so many things, constantly agitated, depressed, and anxious. I started writing more rants. Looking back at all of this later, I could see how obvious it was that I needed help, I needed a friendly voice to whisper in my ear to stop blogging and get professional help. Instead, I was egged on. People loved my rants. They loved my apoplectic anger. The more intense the rant, the more readers it got. A Small Victory was one of the most popular blogs out there, and I was miserable. I was caught in a vortex. I felt like if I stopped blogging it would all disappear and I would never get a chance to put my writing out there again. Yet I knew I needed to stop. I just wouldn’t listen to myself and no one else was calling me out on it because they enjoyed the show too much.

By 2002 I was completely unhinged. I was in the middle of a break with reality. I no longer knew who I was. I had become a machine that spit out words and that machine was breaking down. When the Iraq war started in 2003, I had become unrecognizable to my readers. I started ranting about Saddam and war and getting even. My anger was intense. I don’t even know who I was angry at beside myself for letting my life get away from me. I had lost control of my brain.

My “warblogging” phase was horrific, embarrassing, shameful. I called for war, I called for “revenge,” I called for heads to roll. I lost readers and I lost friends, but I picked up new readers and new friends along the way. That they were all terrible people with harmful views didn’t matter. I was being written in up in the NY Times and Washington Post. MSNBC begged me to come on tv several times. My hometown paper did a little blurb on me. I hated it all. And I kept going. My anger was driving me; my need to be liked was filling the tank so I could keep that drive going, and my acute mental illness was a passenger.

When I started having up to 30 panic attacks a day, I decided I needed to be medicated. I talked to my doctor about it and he put me on a cocktail of Wellbutrin and Paxil. I got worse. I became belligerent to everyone. I committed road rage. I wanted to kill myself because I hated living in this state all the time. But I kept blogging, because it was the only way to get all of those bad feelings out of me. The trouble was, presenting those bad feelings to an eager audience only fueled me to write more. I was writing hateful, awful things. 90% of my online friends abandoned me, rightfully so. I went off my meds cold turkey and almost offed myself in the ensuing withdrawal experience.

In 2004 I voted for Bush. That is one of the most shameful things I did in my life and A Small Victory was broadcasting that shit to the world. I had gone against everything I ever stood for as a small L liberal all the previous years. It was the apex of my breakdown and I was about to slide down the other side.

I’d like to tell you about some long, drawn out conversation I had with myself in which I had an epiphany and realized I was being a bad person. But it wasn’t like that at all. I just woke up one day feeling exhausted at the prospect of being me for another day. I took a long, hot shower and contemplated everything I had done since 2001. I took stock of my life, I looked at where I was and where I had been and was kind of horrified at what I had become. I could do two things with this; I could change or I could opt out of life. I chose to get my act together.

It took several months to do this. Almost a year. I renounced Bush on my blog. In fact, I renounced the entirety of 2002-2005. When the warbloggers I had befriended came after me for turning on them, when I got death threats and had blog after blog written about how I was a traitor and a fraud, I knew none of these people ever had my best interest in mind. I was nothing more than someone they could manipulate into doing their bidding, someone whose mental illness and unchecked anger was useful to them.

I stopped blogging for a bit. I kicked my toxic partner out of the house. I stopped drinking. I saw a different doctor; my old doctor had gotten arrested for selling prescriptions. I started to feel lighter, better. I stopped being so angry. I could breathe normally again. I was left with a wide swath of broken friendships and a stained reputation, but I knew it was time to move forward. Time to get better, try to heal not only myself, but relationships with people I had abandoned.

I left the blog open this whole time. I felt like it was an accurate assessment of my time post 9/11. My own personal cultural artifact of the times. Also, I had forgotten how to get into the blog at all, and I just didn’t bother to look into closing it off.

A few days ago I got an email that a new hosting company was taking over my sites, A Small Victory included. I was given login credentials and, after a few email exchanges, I asked tech support to please make it so the blog was inaccessible to anyone but me. And so it was. There was no fanfare, not big, contemplative talk with myself about it. I just decided I wanted all reminders of those years gone.

It was over the course of the next two days when it hit me. I have effectively put that portion of my life away. It feels like it has always been there, hovering over me, following me around. I feel embarrassed by those days, I feel deep shame and regret. I lost four years of my life. I lost my sense of self. Can you blame me for wanting to rid myself of all of that?

When I tried to access asmallvictory.net, I got a blank page. No image, no 404 page, just…nothing. I breathed a great sigh of relief. The act of nuking my site, of making it so no one but me can look back on those years was greatly satisfying, and deeply rewarding. I have put those years behind me. I have apologized, I have tried to make amends. I have done what I can to move on, and putting an end date on A Small Victory was, in some ways, a big victory.

It is 2024 and I am starting a new blog. This one is going to be about record collections, and record stores, and loving music. No politics. No news. Just me talking about something I love instead of things I hate.

RIP, A Small Victory. You gave me lifelong friends and rekindled my love of writing. Forget everything else. That’s what I’ll take from it.