Well, well, well. Welcome back to The Owl Hours. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? I didn’t have Resuscitate A Fifteen-Year-Old Blog on my bingo card for 2026, but if we had to actually predict our bingo cards, I would’ve done abysmally this year. Thankfully, the game isn’t played that way (and, equally thankfully, most of the surprises have been good ones), but I suppose a bit of an explanation is in order. What’ve I been up to since I set out from this blog, all those years ago? And what prompted me to come back now, and to here, of all places? I’ll do my best to explain.
As with most things on the internet, the beginning of our story lies in the real world.
A useful bit of background info: I first started The Owl Hours in high school, and officially retired it sometime in college. Since then, I’ve lived in four cities across three countries, and moved seven times in the last eight years. Even for someone with a healthy appetite for adventure, it’s been… kind of a lot.
This contrasts oddly with the fact that I spent the entirety of my teens and early twenties yearning for a home that I could call my own. (If we were sitting on a therapist’s couch, I’d probably examine how this began with my parent’s divorce, but I’ll leave that for another day. Suffice to say that it’s your garden-variety of trauma (common, not particularly poisonous.))
I wasn’t imagining a temporary space, during that time in my life. I didn’t specifically want a house, or an apartment, but a home. Somewhere so familiar that I could navigate it in the dark. A place that I could inhabit for years, layering memories over the space until the shape of it, the very scent of it when I walked in the door, felt like a hug.
I still want that, although with a bit less angsty desperation. And I’ll get it eventually, I’m sure, but… can I be honest for a second? I thought, by thirty, that I’d have it by now.
Of course, my life choices haven’t exactly prioritized this dream. I’ll own that. But the fact that my plans for the next few years preclude the creation of such a home, yet again, is a bittersweet thing to sit with.
Maybe that’s part of why I found myself thinking about The Owl Hours recently. Spaces on the internet have a sort of implied physicality to them, in my mind. The New York Times, Instagram, etc. all inhabit Main Street, while communal spots (like subreddit communities dedicated to arcane topics) live one or two streets back. The suburbs stretch out from there, sprawling: the established blogs are well-kept homes that always put out Halloween decorations, while other, more niche sites and podcasts might require a hand-drawn map to reach, or might be more like a little cafe tucked into a residential area that only the locals know about.
When I first started blogging back in 2009, I knew that I was on the very outskirts of the internet. Somewhere on the edges, where the buses don’t run, maybe backing up to a forest. My discoverability was exactly zero; my only readers were my friends and family. I knew this for a fact, because I was on WordPress even back then, and I could see my reader stats. I’m pretty sure they never broke the double digits. But this never seemed like a problem to me, because when I was setting out, all I wanted was a quiet corner of the internet to call my own. If others happened to stumble upon it, then the serendipity only made the encounter more special.
Over time, and through the relentless kind of pestering that only a high schooler can sustain, my spot on the outskirts grew into a little village; surrounded by friends who I’d convinced to start blogs of their own. Very few of these sites survived the transition to college, though. If the internet truly had the physicality I imbue it with in my imagination, this little village would’ve fallen gently to ruin, slowly being reclaimed by the forest.
But this is the technological world we’re speaking of, which tends to do only one of two things with places like those: either embalm them perfectly, preserving the space as if the owner had only walked out a moment ago; or allowing them to wink out of existence altogether, leaving no traces behind.
So it’s been a strange delight, in the process of reviving this blog, to comb back through the blogroll1 and find the time capsule that my friends and I didn’t consciously know we were building. There they are: our teenage selves, still sitting out on the stoops of the little blogs that we built with such care, talking about our dreams and the trivial, everyday details of classes and the occasional friendship dramas that loomed so large in our minds.
That might be why The Owl Hours always felt like my home on the internet. After all, the people are the most important thing about places in real life, so it stands to reason that the same would hold true of the digital world.
It’s a little bit funny, despite this, to look back and realize that I recreated my real-life peripatetic tendencies on the internet. I made new blogs whenever I had the faintest excuse to, because I have a long-standing crush on new beginnings. There was my first blog in middle school (now lost to the mists of time, since I can’t even remember its name), then my second blog that I started in the first year of high school. The Owl Hours was technically the third of its lineage, and existed concurrently with two other blogs: one for flash fiction, and one dedicated specifically to pictures I took of the sky. Later in college came a stint of writing on a blockchain-based platform (the strange economic wormhole that was blockchain in 2017 meant I actually got paid to write whatever I wanted), and after graduation came yet another blog called Imaginary Bookshelf, which was dedicated to my musings on young adult life. Then finally came a stretch of time on Substack, back before people started whispering that it was evil.
But then those whispers got louder, and to be honest, I was also starting to feel disillusioned with Substack for my own reasons. The promise of that site was that it would be like the blogging villages of yore, centered on quaint little downtown areas populated with local shops. A place where it would be easy to discover new blogs, join new communities.
Instead it wound up feeling like a too-big suburb with too little urban planning, populated with McMansions that all look the same, centered on a nightmarish version of Times Square where people shout out thoughts that should’ve stayed in the privacy of their own minds (or, ideally, that they should’ve unpacked and re-examined with the help of their therapists, but I’m aware that this is asking too much of modern culture).
My marketing instincts knew that Substack was the best place to find new readers, but when I asked myself what I actually wanted, it wasn’t to grow as big as humanly possible. Instead, it was what it’s always been: I wanted a little corner on the internet that I could call my own. A place where I could hear myself think, where I could puzzle through things, where I could sometimes write the things that felt too difficult to say out loud.
As I was casting about for somewhere to go after Substack, though, the idea of starting yet another new blog didn’t feel exciting. It just felt… exhausting. I didn’t want yet another new website. I wanted a home; a place so familiar that I knew it even in the dark.
So I locked up my McMansion, walked out of that strange suburb, and kept going until I hit the edges of the internet. And there it was: The Owl Hours, vines and moss (okay, fine, broken links and formatting) starting to creep in at the edges, but otherwise still standing just as I’d left it all those years ago.
Coming back here feels different than starting other blogs of the past. The goal wasn’t exactly a new beginning this time, but it also wasn’t to move wholesale back into a space that I’d originally created as a teenager. I wanted somewhere that felt like mine; that’s true to who I am today. So I set to work, giving the site a much-needed renovation, combing back through all those other old blogs and furnishing the space with the thoughts I’ve slowly collected over the years. I wanted everything in one place, a sense of personal history, of context.
Despite some rather ruthless culling as I went (shocking, I know, that I didn’t feel any need to preserve the song lyrics I posted back in middle school, nor the details of the Korean skincare routine that I followed in college), a full hundred posts survived the move, split between the blogging and fiction sections. I wasn’t aiming for any particular number as I sorted through everything – it just happened that way – but it feels fitting.
The exercise of reading through everything has been interesting in ways that I wasn’t anticipating. The archives stretch back to 2010, technically predating The Owl Hours itself, since I went and found the posts I wrote on the site that was its predecessor. All told, the writing here spans half my life. And while it’s an incomplete narrative, told piecemeal, I can still track both the development of my writing and how I grew into the person I am today through those posts.
I thought I’d be embarrassed by those early, teenage thoughts and would toss out most of them. Instead I was surprised to find that I have more in common with teenage Mara, and like her better, than some of the more recent versions of myself. Yes, she thought that both bolding and italicizing words at the same time was a good idea, but she also had a crackling sort of energy to her. She was excited about life, about what she could make out of the possibilities on the horizon. She wasn’t intimidated by much, and as a result, I find that I have a certain affection for her, questionable italics choices and all.
Even before I started this project, I’d been feeling for the last year or so that I was rediscovering parts of myself that had lain dormant since my teenage years. When I mentioned this to my mom, she offered up an apt metaphor, observing that we often tread familiar ground as we grow and change over the years, but that it’s less like walking in a circle and more like walking up the spiral atrium of the Guggenheim. You may return to where you were before, but from a different vantage point, the view changing each time.
Given this, and since I have more in common with that girl these days than with the woman I became in my twenties, it feels fitting to return to this space that she originally built.
She also, it must be said, wrote more than my college and adulthood selves. This isn’t shocking, because she was less self-conscious about what she wrote. The blog posts become noticeably sparser as the archives move into my adult life, and there’s a handful of reasons for this. It can be a little bit hard reading some of them back, because when I contrast the writing with what I know was going on behind the scenes, I see the story of a woman who was shrinking in on herself. Learning to take up less space, dreaming smaller, and ultimately uncertain about what kind of writing she could – or should – be putting out into the world. Yet I’ve left most of those posts here, because at the end of the day, they still speak truthfully to who I was at the time.
Of course, the writing I published online doesn’t represent the sum total of what I wrote back then. My work revolved around creating content, I had a novel that I was (slowly, ineffectually) editing, and I’m sure it doesn’t come as a surprise that I’m an intermittent but inveterate diarist. This partially explains why my writing voice suddenly evolved in 2024, which I suspect was the result of three things:
First, that I was setting off to travel, and had begun plotting my escape from a career that’d been sucking my life-force and quietly inhibiting what I wrote online, lest my employers find it and decide… what, exactly? That I was unfit to work for them because I was highly opinionated about bookshelves? It’s unclear, but the amorphous fear and its resultant self-filtering finally dropped when I pulled out my laptop on that very first flight.
Second, I’d always thought of blogging as just “talking on paper” – as opposed to the way I approached writing fiction, where my head was always stuffed with craft and lofty, grandiose goals about what I wanted my writing to be. In a way, this unselfconscious approach to personal writing was a boon, since it lowered the barrier to entry and meant that I wrote more. But it also meant that I never approached it with any sort of intention, until I looked at my travel plans and recognized that they fit neatly with the shape of a lot of travelogues I’d enjoyed over the years.
My travels ultimately didn’t end up working out that way, but the realization prompted me to look at the work of the creative nonfiction writers I admired, and engage with their writing not only as a form of entertainment, but as a series of examples of things that I could try doing myself. My passionate love of paragraph dividers, or asterisms, came about as a direct result of this process. It also expanded my concept of what a blog post could tackle, prompting me to go after ideas that I’d previously only managed to articulate in long and meandering conversations, or sometimes hadn’t even found words for before. I tried an essay structured around a walk, and another around a particular argument I wanted to make, and started asking something of my nonfiction that I never had before: could it capture a particular texture, a certain quality of my experiences, and share it with others?
Third, and finally, I simply got older. Memories continued to accumulate over the years that I wasn’t blogging much, piling up in mental snowdrifts, naturally affecting how I saw and experienced the world. So I found, when I returned to personal writing, that explaining how I felt about things was no longer as simple as it’d been when I was younger. There was context that I wanted my readers to know, nuance and shading that felt necessary to complete the stories I was trying to tell. That necessity broke down barriers between the things I was trying to convey about the present and things that had happened in the past. Often, these were things I hadn’t written about when I was younger, but that time and maturity have granted me the ability to examine now.
As a result, the handful of essays that I wrote from 2024 onward are some of the posts I’m proudest of, and that I feel most accurately represent who I am today. So when I decided that I wanted to add an audio narration component to the site, these ended up being the posts I decided to focus on.
I don’t promise that every piece going forward will be exactly like those ones. Part of the beauty of having your own space on the internet, I think, is the sovereign freedom granted by that ownership. So as the proprietress of The Owl Hours, I reserve this space not only for essays, but also for whatever kind of writing I feel like doing going forward: old-fashioned blog posts, informal notes, and all manner of other things included.
Feel free to look around, sift through the archives if it suits your fancy, check out the fiction section, do whatever appeals to you. Make yourself comfortable. If you’d like to subscribe, you can find both an email sign-up and RSS links on the about page. As a small housekeeping note, the subscriptions are divided into blog and fiction categories, so proceed accordingly, depending upon what content you want to receive (if you’re doing this by email, you’ll be prompted to choose which subscriptions you want after entering your address). I foresee the blog section of this site being more active than the fiction section, but that’s subject to my whims and could change at any time.
If this truly was a physical space, I’d invite you in for tea, give you a tour, show you what I’ve done with the place… probably brag about the baseboards I painted or some-such (actually, I’m kind of proud of what I managed with the theme this time around. But a web developer I am not, so if you spot any issues, please let me know). Once that was done, we could stroll out into the garden and let the conversation wander from there, or we could sit on the front steps and see if we could spot anyone else we recognize in this little blogging neighborhood.
But, in the absence of that, I’ll leave you to it. To those of you who saw The Owl Hours in its first incarnation, allow me to welcome you back. To those of you who are new, a warm welcome – I’m happy to have you here.
And, finally, to myself: welcome home.
Footnotes
- If you’re the curious sort, you might be sitting there going, “Blogroll? What blogroll? Where?” Once upon a time, it used to live in the right-hand menu of the post pages, but I removed it during the renovation. Leaving it intact struck me as an unkindness by way of inertia (exposing your teenage thoughts to the internet should be an opt in situation, not something that’s decided for you).
Creating an updated map of the blogging neighborhoods I wander around these days, though, is on the to-do list. ↩︎
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