My very first blog; circa 2004
It's 4am and I can't sleep.
I got home from a tabletop game party at like 1am. My send-off party. It was so much fun, having almost all my closest friends there with me, playing games and drinking and chatting and admiring the beauty of my sister's cats. I guess all the socializing has me wired in awaken mode. Of course, the fact that I haven't been sleeping very well in the past couple of days might contribute to the insomnia. It had been a solid month since I last had a real case of it.
I've spent a good chunk of May thinking of what to write here. Lying in bed at night I'd have ten different ideas for blog posts, and in the morning I'd forget about each and every one of them. It's been a rough couple of months, mentally speaking. Spatially speaking too, even though that might sound weird.
But well, it's almost 5am now and I do have something I'd like to record and share with the wide tiny web.
I've recently found my old blog from 2004 (maybe my very first blog, dare I say). I was at that awful phase of my early teen years. On my very first post I was 13 years old. It's so awkward rereading it. It brought up a lot of memories that would otherwise be completely lost, but I'm thankful it's only accessible via Way Back Machine.1 I don't think any one else on this Earth remembers my old url but me. Oh, the blessings of the 2000s internet life!
Of course I clicked around on every single link--I even found my old "Harry Pttr" blog and my CLAMP fan site! Which is like, a miracle; both only lasted for a couple of months, tops.2 Among all the links in the sidebar, of course, were the urls from fellow bloggers. Girls all over Brazil, between the ages of 12 (!) and 15 sharing their lives online and linking their blogs to each other. Absolutely batshit crazy stuff to think about in this day and age. And of course, all of us were completely unsupervised.
While perusing these other blogs, a couple of things stood out to me:
- My weird way of writing blog posts was very similar to these other girls--loads of very basic kaomojis, excess exclamation points, always using "PS"s on almost every blog post, and for some reason, an "alter ego" that would have whole sentences mixed with our own writing, as if we were having a conversation with this imaginary friend.
- My internet friends were so much smarter than me.
Both points were not a revelation. Well, maybe the first one is more striking to me now, but I was very aware of the second point at the time. I often found myself thinking about how these other girls were so smart and cultured. Some of them liked theater. Classic literature. They visited websites about feminism!!! They were so articulate.
Now, looking back at those long-lost friends' posts, the feeling is unchanged. I was so lucky then to be surrounded by girls who were better, smarter and more informed than me. They helped me so much and opened my eyes to so many other things that to this day have an impact in my real life.
And today, after the send-off party with so many amazing people I have the privilege of calling friends, I realize my pattern is still pretty much unchanged: my friends are still so much better than me. And I'm still so lucky for it. I'm so lucky to be able to learn from them, to absorb a little bit of them to myself. They keep me on my toes in the best way possible.
The best part is, I'm much more confident in who I am now than I was at 13 on the internet. Which both humbles and boasts the way I navigate this life.
It was really interesting seeing that this little pattern of my life is still the same, twenty years down the road.
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