TEN YEARS of Blogging!

The Blonde Prep, April 2014

Today in lieu of This Week's Top 10, we are celebrating my 10-year blog anniversary! I can NOT believe it's been 10 years. I remember coming home from school on this day in eighth grade and starting "the blonde prep" on Blogspot. My first post, of course, was a "welcome to the blonde prep," and I think my second post was either about j.crew or Vineyard Vines. I had no idea what I was doing, but every day I would come home with this newfound excitement to jump on the computer, create Polyvore collages (who remembers that?!), and online shop to share all of my new favorite things with maybe the five people that read my pink and orange, chevron stripe blog.

It was so funny back then because I truly was so excited and in love with blogging. A couple of my middle school best friends had started blogs too, so we would brainstorm post ideas together, and do little collabs (I think we called them link-ups at the time hah). I would write at least one blog post per day! I miss having that much creativity and energy to share. Now, it feels like I need to put a lot of time and energy into a blog post... creating my graphics and linking things in a blog post now takes hours that I simply don't have anymore. However, I still love doing this, otherwise, I wouldn't be doing this anymore!

I say this to people in my life all the time, but creating my blog and transferring colleges are the two best decisions I have made in my life. Both of those things led me to where I am now in my life, and I often think to myself now, at 23, that I have achieved every single dream I hoped to achieve by this time. Of course, my life is so not perfect, and I'm not like 100% happy with every single decision I've ever made, but I am in a place now where I need to really sit down and set goals for the rest of my life, because everything (generally) that I wanted to accomplish, I've accomplished. From the day I started my blog, I wanted to move to New York City. Throughout middle and high school I loved math, so I figured I would work in Finance, but I think tech consulting is close enough. While I'm not obsessed with my job, and I don't plan to live in NYC forever, I really don't think I'd be here if I had never started my blog. I'm not sure if many people can say that.

My blog is the reason I had an internship every summer of college, and those internships are the reason I got my job. My job is the reason I moved to New York. Redesigning my blog in high school took lots of googling and HTML and CSS learning. That in itself is why I took my first computer science class, and when that didn't go well (LOL that is a whole other story), led me to major in information systems. Looking back, I like to say that I wish I had majored in something else, but if I had, I probably wouldn't have gotten my job, and then who knows if I would have moved to NYC.

I really like to believe everything happens for a reason. I remember in high school being so embarrassed when people found out about my blog. I would be laughed at and made fun of, even one time I removed my blog from being public! It is so funny now how much blogging has changed, has become an "industry" not even revolving around blogs anymore. I feel so grateful I got to be a part of this when it was what it used to be. I am grateful to all of you for following along on this journey, but I'm also really grateful for 13-year-old Franny (oh yeah, I also spelled Franny with a "y" before high school lol) for just doing whatever she wanted-- that is something her and I still have in common, along with an undying love for pink & green!

Unfortunately, many of the photos from my OG blog posts are broken, but please enjoy a few below that I was able to uncover! (please note how LONG my hair was in high school. omg)