I always liked the idea of keeping a record of my creations, even though I wasn’t always good at keeping track of the things I did.

The idea of this blog is intertwined with that. More than occupying space online and practicing my English writing, I intend for this page to be a collection and archive of my digital content over the years. That’s why I decided to go after my older blogs and publications.

The one that I really wanted to find was my first-ever published story. When I was 10 I wrote a little memoir for a writing class (we were learning what a memoir was). It was a silly story, about my favourite stuffed animal, that started to speak out of the blue. The ending was a bit dark, and a decade later I realized that it had to do with some trauma I experienced when I was 8.

But back in 1996 my teachers really liked what I wrote and decided to publish it in the school newspaper. I was in heaven. In my kid’s head, that was a real newspaper and my text was the only one selected. It made me feel special.

Now in 2024, I felt an urge to read that story again. I looked for any trace of it online on the school’s website, but it wasn’t there. I was thinking about visiting the school myself next time I go to Brazil and go through their files when I remembered that I had already done that. In 2008 I went to the school and got a copy of the memoir, to publish in the blog I had at the time.

That’s when I started to go down the memory lane. Luckily my first blog (Papel Sem Pauta) is still online. I had completely forgotten about it. I vaguely remember my blogs back in Brazil, and I knew I had started something in 2006, but I had no idea how much I had written.

I started going back to each post, one by one, and was surprised by how at ease I was. How light and carefree my writing was, many times a stream of consciousness, as would just sit in front of the computer and start to write whatever was on my mind. The tagline tells it all: “Groups of letters arranged in different sizes, separated by spaces and punctuations”. There are dreams, other people’s poems, reflections and even some short stories. I’m amazed at how I had forgotten all of that.

I always thought that I was a short-lived blogger, but the truth is that I never stopped writing or creating content online.

Here’s a list for the record.

• Papel Sem Pauta (2006-2009):
  • My first blog. Created without fixed topic to be an extension of my high school notebooks. Lots of short stories, dreams and poetry.
• Iniciativa Sustentável (2009-2010):
  • A blog about actions towards sustainability. I created it after watching the video The Story of Stuff. This blog helped me land a job writing about Sustainability for a magazine.
• Lalá Recicla (2009-2010):
  • A sort of blog bazaar to sell used clothes
• Nos Olhos de Quem Vê (2010-2014):
  • An extension of Iniciativa Sustentável, renamed to include more generic topics. That’s when I first started writing about Politics and Civil Rights.
• Medium (2015, 2018-2019):
  • It has some 3 different publications, but I wrote very sporadically. Some of my first attempts in blogging in English
• Portfolio (2019):
  • The idea was to establish a presence online to help me get a job. I wrote mainly about Brazil. Not my brightest work.
• Data Portfolio (2022-present):
  • To showcase my work as I move into a new field as a Dataviz Expert.
• Ladislara (2024):
  • Current Blog!