Feeling Like A Dinosaur...

I recently cleaned up my browser bookmarks. Something I hadn’t done in years...so many years (maybe a decade?!). I also recently had my camera body professionally cleaned for the first time ever, so as you can tell I’m a very organized and tidy person. Looking through those ancient bookmarks though was a real trip down memory lane; bookmarked were dozens of blogs I used to read daily and nearly every link was dead. A few had updated for the last time three years ago or so, but most links just loaded empty pages. It’s wild to think of all the blogs I used to read, the people who inspired me to start blogging, and realize how long ago they disappeared. Names like Agathe and Liebemarlene used to get a mountain of response from other bloggers; we would all discuss when we had first discovered their blogs and how they helped us realize how accessible vintage fashion could be. These days when I mention old bloggers to current bloggers the names don’t ring any bells. The girls who paved the way used to be on everyone’s lips, their pictures dominated WeHeartIt but you’ll never find them on Pinterest; even Google image search with their blog names yields fewer and fewer results every year. They say things on the Internet last forever, but these fading records of early fashion bloggers are proof that even the Internet’s memory isn’t forever. This exercise also served to make me feel like a dinosaur; it's easy to feel out-of-touch, fossilized and irrelevant in the fast-paced world of the web. Can you believe I have been blogging for a dozen years now? My blog is practically a teenager! In an age of pre-teen influencers I'm a virtual grandmother. And yet while my blog and my body grows older, I feel much the same as I did when I began. I even dress the same--to an extent; I like to think I have become the polished version of my rough-edged self. Some people say my look is a bit too juvenile and it's become fun to make people guess my age. However, like blogging and feeling out-of-touch, wondering if my style is age appropriate or if other people approve or like what I wear, feels less and less relevant as I do get older. And if you ask me how old I am, I'm going to say "older than I look, but younger than I feel."