I was an OG blogger. Now what?

For the women who led the charge into this wild west of digital content creation, what do we do when the headwinds change?

There is a classic scene in "The Agony and the Ex-tacy," the Sex and the City episode in which Carrie turns 35 years old, has a birthday dinner at Il Cantinori, and no one shows up. She's sitting there, waiting, wondering where her friends are, when a birthday cake arrives for a woman at the next table. As she blows out the candles, her birthday twin yells—unironically—25! Fuck, I'm old!

To watch this scene and understand it is to look in the rearview mirror of one's own youth. To shake your head, along with Carrie, at anyone who believes 25 to be old. (And to shake your head at Carrie herself, that she felt the same about 35.) I imagine this is how my mother and grandmother feel now, hearing me talk about my approaching 40th birthday.

But this is not an essay about age and wisdom; no, it is an essay about having a similar reaction when I hear women on Instagram talk about their nascent careers in content creation.

They'll say, I've been doing this for two years now; here's everything I've learned. Or, It's my five year blog anniversary, I cannot believe it has been this long! I smile internally when I hear reflections like this, if not (admittedly) giving each woman an imaginary pat on the shoulder. Give it another 10, 15 years, I think, wondering what they'll share when (if?) they arrive at that distant mile marker. How their relationship will have changed with the thing they have built—or, if they're like so many before them, once built.

As someone who launched a blog in 2008 (let me repeat: TWO THOUSAND EIGHT), made money from it for a time, built a thriving independent design studio from it for even longer, and leveraged everything I learned into a full-time job that I ultimately left, here is a thought I keep coming back to:

What am I supposed to do now?