Xanga.
Never heard of it? That’s okay, we may be from different decades.
It is year 2000. I am a computer geek, fingers twirling and pirouetting on my keyboard. Online. Nothing but a green round chat bot representing me on MSN Messenger. (Have I lost you? Are we actually from different eras?)
I’m trying to remember the name of my first ever website, but I can’t recall, I may have edited the HTML myself, that’s how insanely cool I was. Oddly I do attach the memories of making a bright teal-coloured webpage to the corners of September 2001, it was around the time my father volunteered in Afghanistan. I had a chunky iMac.
Fast forward to YM, AOL, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, I landed in the blogging world. Xanga. That was my jive. I used to write online. A lot. The domain name which I picked without truly understanding its meaning (don’t remind me now) would send me first-class flight to hell (astaghfirulullah nauzubillah min zalik). That was of course, Before Century Ainna.
But -
it all started from my Xanga world. Xanga was my creative outlet (dare I call it my passion?) I loved pretending that I could write. I dropped witty one-liners to other writers and fell into friendships with some seriously wonderful readers, those whom I am still connected today online and in real life. They’re my OG readers, lovingly, uncomplainingly reading my long Instagram captions just last week. Thanks to Xanga, I proved to the world that I was a decent, common blogger.
I had a brief stint on Wordpress in 2015, I stopped after two posts. Short and sweet. I convinced myself to believe that I stopped at excellency (a.k.a I lost the will to go on). Be a mediocre writer? Never.
It turns out, I still am a mediocre writer today. It is year 2023. Substack. That’s where the old kids hangout. That’s where people go into mid-life crises. An alternative place to write the world’s longest of captions. Brava, Ainna.
It’s different this time, I may still be a mediocre writer, but my content is anything but mediocre. It’s ‘Ihsan’, ‘إحسان’, ‘excellent’, ‘perfection’, and I say that with the humblest of brags, because it’s not mine, it’s the content of Allah’s.
I hope this time you’ll stay.