In 2013, my eighteen-year-old-self sat, heart pounding, laptop open, about to click the "create a blog" button on Blogger, the Google-hosted blog website.
It was the year Instagram really took off internationally, it was the September before Zoella reached her first million subscribers, and it was the beginning of the "influencer" age.
Before 2013, the only people really making money from their social media presence were the Kardashians... and Viners.
I first started Alice's Antics because I'd been obsessively reading the blog of another girl, Hannah, who was writing about the highs and lows of life as a Law student in Essex.
Hannah's blog - which is heartbreakingly now shut down - made me laugh out loud as she recounted awkward sex stories and a time when she ordered two Ben and Jerrys' because she found out Dominos had a minimum spend for delivery and she didn't want to walk anywhere to buy it.
My kinda gal.
My first blog post still exists, and although it is awkward and bumble-y, it remains true to the heart of Alice's Antics and what I always wanted this place to be, a kind of best friend for people who read it.
An insight into my life which, on occasion, translates to life lessons and laugh-out-louds for my readers.
It's something I've continued (I hope) throughout the whole blogging process and have big plans to continue to do for the foreseeable future.
Anyway, the first year of Alice's Antics was a bit of a whirlwind.
I was emailed by Niomi Smart as she was in the founding stages of her own blog, and I was featured on Louise Pentland's (aka Sprinkle of Glitter) list of blogs to read in 2014.
I enjoyed a flurry of new followers, some PR attention and the realisation that people actually enjoyed this space, it wasn't just me, writing for nobody.
It became my pride and joy, and was a literal fuck you to all of the people who had made fun of me creating a blog in its early stages.
And, well, that's transcended across the last five years. Alice's Antics has taught me more about myself and what I love, than anything else.
It's been with me through my gap year, spent gallivanting around Italy. It's seen me through three years of university, I wrote a blog post on losing my dog, I opened up about the grief of losing someone when you're living abroad, and I felt sick when I wrote about quitting my London PR job to move abroad.
I've had my nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second and twenty-third birthdays whilst writing Alice's Antics.
And you can bet there's a blog post for most of those too.
All in all, it has been the best decision of my life. If it weren't for Alice's Antics, I wouldn't be where I am now. I wouldn't be able to do what I now do and I wouldn't have realised just how much I love writing.
There have been three hundred and twenty five posts over the last five years.
There are 5,032 followers of this little internet space.
In its short life, it has been visited 923,991 times by people across the world.
And the five countries the majority of this audience comes from are the UK, USA, Russia, Australia and Germany.
When I first started Alice's Antics, it had two followers for three months. I never stopped writing it, because I was never writing for the audience. But reading those statistics blows my mind.
There were times this year when I almost clicked delete on Alice's Antics. I was stuck in a rut and was so unhappy that I didn't know how to write anymore. Despite the beautiful Instagrams, I was desperately unhappy and wanted to rid myself of anything and everything that made me "me".
Thankfully, that never happened. And I couldn't be more grateful to the people who helped me through that than I already am.
Five years later, and you've all witnessed the highs and lows of my life. I am so proud to own Alice's Antics and I am so excited to see where the next five years takes me.
So, thank you to those of you who didn't believe in me and didn't believe in this blog - writing this post is all the sweeter knowing you didn't think I would be here.
But most importantly thank YOU.
Without your comments, your views and your presence across my social media, who knows if I would have stuck this out for so long?
I am forever grateful to the people who spend their time scrolling through each post, so to "celebrate" I would LOVE to do a little something for you.
I'm currently living in Sydney and would love to send a postcard to a few of my readers.
Please don't leave any personal details in the comments - email me at alicesantics@outlook.com and I will endeavour to write to you.
A million thank yous. Below are five of my personal pictures to summarise the last five years.
I. LOVE. YOU. ALL.
Love, Alice x
P.S. I feel like, after five years, I need to write a special thanks to 5 specific people who have championed me since they knew about Alice's Antics.
So thank you Alexandria, for being both my rock and biggest fan in Italy. Thank you Kitty, for being a queen, a friend and always supporting my writing. Thank you Jamie, for reading so much more than just my blog posts, and being brutally honest when I have terrible ideas. Thank you Alvaro, for sharing and loving so many posts the second they are posted. And thank you Gemma, you're the only reason Alice's Antics wasn't deleted this year.
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