I’m posting this to submit to this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, which, this month, focuses on “self-expression.”

For the past 24 years, I have been posting on my blog at kalilily.net. These days, at age 85, I am “just an old lady talking to herself” because “when I talk to myself, I tell the truth.” And when I blog, I assert my small existence in the context of an increasingly complex and expanding world.

I began blogging in 2001, when the parameters of my life shrunk to encompass my life as a live-in-caregiver for my mother, who had severe dementia. As my social life diminished in response to her needs, I followed the lead of my son, now blogging at bix.blog, whose presence on the internet introduced me to the leading personal bloggers of the time.

I am a published poet, and my blog gave me the opportunity to share my poetry, as well as to comment on whatever personal or larger issues motivated me to want express my perspectives.

My blog became my online journal, as I chronicled my explorations in using medical marijuana and documented the five days at my mother’s bedside waiting for her to take her last breath.

My blog is the one place I am free to express my opinions, share my experiences, and document major episodes in my life’s journey. Now, at age 85, my outlets for self expression are severely limited. I no longer ballroom dance, which, at one point in my younger years was my main outlet for self expression — along with occasional public readings of my poetry.

Because I was one of the early personal bloggers, I was invited, and I attended, the first Blog Conference at Harvard. Subsequently, I was interviewed by several major newspapers that were chronicling the emergence of blogging communities. All of this helped to reassure me that expressing myself publicly was a worthwhile pursuit.

While my physical world has shrunk, my need to write and assert my existence in this fragile world has not. And so I continue blogging, even if I am only talking to myself.