I looked back at my old LiveJournal tonight for various reasons. It was embarrassing and hilarious. But mostly, it was sweet. I didn’t filter anything. I wrote what I wanted. I had run-on sentences, and frequently mentioned situations and inside jokes no one else would care about. But it made me smile. It was a great journal, after all.

After LJ was HDS with blogger. It started the same, really, perhaps a bit better. But then HDS got a bit of a following, and while the public was appreciated, it also attributed to my – for lack of better words – downfall. I started trying too hard. Concentrating too much on writing the perfect piece. I wanted everyone to continue reading, I wanted them to love me.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved what I wrote. I think some of my favorite blog posts are on HDS. But some posts also felt empty, like I was writing a story, and not about myself.

Anyway, I started Lauren Writes because I wanted to find a way to blend the two. Write what I want, but better. I don’t know how well i’ve accomplished that, really. But I’m making it my goal now to try harder. I miss blogging, I do. I want to look back on this blog and remember myself, not an image of myself that I wanted to portray.

So expect some new things here. We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, here’s something I wrote on my LJ. It says a lot about me, I think:

The past few months I’ve felt like I was dating the library. Seriously. It started out back in August, when I remembered how useful the local library was. I remembered old times we had together back in high school, those days of reading plays in the small cramped aisles. I started visiting it every now and then, jogging down the street, and that’s when the library flirting started. Quite quickly, it became serious. Since I was jobless, I was there quite often. The days I wasn’t, I typically received a phone call informing me that a book came in. Swoon. But just as quickly as we got together, things started slipping. Phone calls were less frequent. I started missing those automated, “Hello, Hello…this is the Seminole County Public Library System with a message for…” phone calls. Was it because of the one 5 cents late fee? I started visiting less often. I even had my mom drop off a book for me–i couldn’t face the library myself. But then yesterday…yesterday it called. I had a book in! I triumphantly picked up that book, smirking as I walked in. I knew it would come back to me…I always knew.