Ten years ago right now I wondered what would happen if I started writing a web diary.

Ten years. I haven’t had any address in my entire life as long as I’ve had pamie.com. Very few things last an entire decade. I thought I should do something special to commemorate it, as it’s not often one reaches a ten-year anniversary of anything, but in many ways it felt too self-important. I’m the only one who has actually been here every day of those ten, who wrote the words and uploaded the pages and checked the stats and blah, blah, blah. It felt like I’d be patting myself on the back for typing and uploading.

Friends and lovers have come and gone and there’s been life and death and travel and huge changes and there’s no real way to talk about the past ten years. I didn’t want to trivialize the important people and events of my past ten years. There’s no way to hold it all up, the big moments and little. It would take another website the size of pamie.com.

There’s been you. All of you. And because of that I got lucky enough to have a career in writing… which, if you click the link to read that very first entry, is clearly nothing short of a miracle.

In the end, I didn’t have any words about what it means to have kept this site going for ten years. I don’t really know what it means, if it means anything. Or if it proves anything, other than the Internet wasn’t just a fad, and it turns out it actually was “for girls,” despite what my ex told me fourteen years ago. I’m grateful to have a wonderful group of readers, and there’s not one tiny part of my life that hasn’t been forever changed by this place. I’m thankful I get to do things like Dewey, and met some of the smartest and funniest people on this planet. It still amazes me when I think of the relationships that formed through this place — including more than one marriage — and that still, even this past weekend, after something funny happens someone will turn to me and ask, “Are you going to blog about that?”

I don’t know if I would have gotten into this thing if I’d known one day it would have such an un-sexy word used to describe it.

I guess all I can really say is thanks. I can’t believe it’s been so long, and I can’t believe it feels like just yesterday I was sitting at a desk in Austin, loading up a Geocities page, pretending I had something important to say.

A few weeks ago I went to see Cat in her awesome improv musical show, and found myself standing in the lobby of the theater where I first performed and auditioned in Los Angeles, that very first year I started pamie.com, when I still thought it was a good idea to write about my love life. I watched Cat sing and dance on the stage where I made my first steps in this city, where I had my first disappointment, where I first saw headshots in a Dumpster, an image I still haven’t forgotten.

Being back in that theater, after all these years (and eventually getting into Aspen), I kept thinking of how different things are. If I had the option of finding myself backstage there ten years ago, would I have told younger-me anything? Given her any wisdom or advice?

I decided I wouldn’t. It could change something, and even the painful lessons I’ve learned over the past decade, I needed to learn them. Wait. There’s one thing: I’d tell her to keep that apartment she had with Ray a little longer, or at least find a subletter. That place was sweet. It should have been kept in our circle.

Happy Ten Years, pamie.com. I couldn’t have become me without you.