Oh how I miss the days when companies didn’t get the Internet. It was a funny time, looking through the windows that offered glimpses of those who knew something. ‘I have this piece of the puzzle.’ I made regular visits to Mercola, Tavi, Stumptious, Steve Pavlina. You know them, if you were there you know them. A free land, with experts popping up everywhere. A single blogger, the first ones who dared to speak up, would be known in homes throughout the world. And it was this speaking out that was revolutionary, most were reading, but waiting, like me. For permission, at this new thing. Many were just doing something else entirely, I guess. But permission they brought. Tavi at being eccentric and smart, yet young. Very daring. Mercola about a new health, or being more logical than your doctor, it was unheard of. Many ludicrous theories about health were born. Stumptious about lifting heavy stuff – as a woman. Yes, there was a conversation about ‘bulky’ and it had to be had. Steve Pavlina took personal development and launched it into the sky like a banner saying; this is what you could be, too. I liked his openness at trying the new, I liked his clean writing.
There was so much to learn, so much to know! There was originals and then there was copycats, whose repetition was too obvious. I would want to shake them at their ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ a phrase I detest, but I was with all along, climbing the steps from SAD [Standard American Diet] to Vegetarian to Vegan to Raw and then dropping it at finally realising no enlightenment is reached through food. Having traveled the great distances from raw food to juices to smoothies to fermentation, past tooth paste made from clay, and the all encompassing thunderstorm that was the Great Cleanout of all toxicity in personal hygiene I know too well this road brings very little actual betterment.
It took me a while to realise, while I was secretly reading up on how-to-live-life, so were many others. In fact, it took me so long, it wasn’t until the shelves in supermarkets were filled with wheat grass juice that it hit me, this was really happening for real. Because I have in my head this picture of the world and it’s kind of ideal and good and supermarkets do simple things and people have woken up from their silly schemes for power and money and of course I know that isn’t realistic and I see the world and its events, but also half ignore the things, because well because it seems so silly to me. But then some woman writes a razor-sharp article in Vanity fair and opens up my world to what the other people are doing and my mind is stretched to realisations, about of course, we are never going back, it is never going to be a simple supermarket ever again. And I wonder, a rational thought, have I ever had one at all?
Tosca Mitkowska 