At seven sharp, when the clock hands land on the hour, I unlock the door, take off my earrings and necklace, and set down the weight of the day along with them. The air conditioning hums for a few minutes. Then I open my accounts and look at the numbers, and at the comments.
By day I'm an ordinary employee. After hours, I'm a writing blogger.
Looking back, the path seems to have been smooth. It also wasn't, really.
My first encounter with self-media came through a relative who was already posting. I was a first-year student at the time and played around with it, with no plan and no real sense of what self-media even meant — I just posted bits of daily life. But I had been writing since middle school and kept the habit through university, so most of what I put out was about writing: acceptance letters, ordinary drafting days, lessons from pieces that didn't land. Somehow that drew readers who cared about the same things. I never thought much about it. It was a pastime.
I studied advertising at an ordinary undergraduate university. In my third year there was a course called New Media Creative Practice, which required us to run our own accounts. The internet likes to claim you need ten thousand followers to get the credit; the real bar was far lower. Still, that course quietly opened a door I hadn't noticed before.
The final assignment showed me how much was hidden inside my own school.
One classmate shot a four-seasons video graded like the film Little Forest — soft, almost painfully beautiful. A guy who loved singing submitted a cover; his Bilibili account was played over the classroom speakers, and I followed him on the spot. Another classmate, a striking girl, was already an influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers. Her group used her short videos as their submission, and because the numbers were strong the teacher gave them a high score.
Back in the dorm that night I said, "I really wish I could be someone like her." A close roommate patted my shoulder and told me I could be.
After graduation I worked as a video editor and then as a screenwriter. New media stopped being a cold phrase on a page. There's an old line about how what you learn from books is shallow until you've done the thing yourself — and that was true here. Day by day, through the work, I came to understand the industry, sometimes by choice and sometimes because I had no other option, and I grew more and more glad I had picked advertising.
Things move fast now. Fall behind and you get left behind. New media is an evolution of traditional media; self-media is media that belongs to one person. The two overlap, with small differences in between.
The ambition came from that one course. The foundation came from work. So I started tending my own accounts in the hours outside my job.
Effort tends to get noticed eventually.
Last month my follower count on one platform passed a thousand. Small, but it moved me from anonymous reader to something like a minor blogger. The traffic arrived like a downpour — and so did criticism. I've been working out how to handle it: fix what's worth fixing, try harder where there's nothing to fix. Other people's judgments come from where they happen to stand, and they aren't automatically correct. My part is to do the right things and move toward the goal with bigger, quicker steps.
Along the way I've picked up friends who blog about writing too. We chat now and then. Everyone is somewhere different, giving off a little light, gradually turning toward it.
Maybe the road ahead is long. Maybe I'll never become a big blogger. But doing the thing I love, and getting somewhere with it, is meaning enough.
The wish I felt in that classroom has become something I actually do. The positive feedback has made me more confident and more resilient — I still believe in effort, and in the ten-thousand-hour rule.