I was toying with the idea of going back through my old blog posts and revisiting them here. Got about two posts in and noped it right out of there.
The thing is, I don’t remember writing a lot of those things. The Wayback Machine doesn’t archive everything, so I didn’t have a whole lot to draw from, but what I did see was… ugh. I’m just not that person anymore, for better or worse, and it was hard coming face to face with her.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the internet lately. I was initially hesitant to attach my real name to this site, but (as hard as it is to admit to myself) I am a writer, and my name is already out there, attached to profiles, articles, and facilities I’ve written for. I don’t plan to promote this beyond sharing it with people I already know, and I have written content long enough to know that it’s hard to make things take hold when you’re trying to, much less when you’re not. So, the odds of this thing going viral are pretty slim.
But I’m older. I’m more cautious. So, I’m more aware of what I’m putting out there. Apparently, much more aware than I was back then.
Was it cool when another local blogger showed up at a bar when I was 26, didn’t approach me all night, and then quietly asked me if I enjoyed my chicken nuggets as he walked out the door because he knew I went to get chicken nuggets before I went to the bar because I told this person I have never met that I was leaving to go get chicken nuggets and then exactly what bar I was going to so he showed up there and asked me about chicken nuggets?
Hell yeah, it was.
Was it awesome when another blogger I met online showed up at Jack’s when my nursing school friends and I were celebrating the end of another round of finals and bought us a round?
Yes.
Was it amazing when a different blogger I was always envious of came up to me at Jack’s once and said, “Are you Jen from the internet?”
Absolutely, it was.
But that was a long time ago. And we don’t live in the internet of the mid-aughts anymore.
More recently, I was obsessed with the Hot Chef drama as the relationship was unfolding and then when it went down in flames. And then the internet did what it does and got very divided and very mean, very quickly.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the basics: A young American woman met a Hot Chef in Paris, and they fell in love. They were planning a life together; all was going well, and then he ended it.
Something I found interesting while watching this woman process what happened was her endless pursuit of trying to understand why it happened the way it did and why some people were being so mean to her.
And that’s exactly what my blog was back then. Desperately trying to find a reason why for everything.
I remember getting some shitty comments on my blog back in the day that just made me so sad. The Pittsburgh blogging community was quite small 20 years ago. There was no crazy algorithm, and it was really only nerds who embraced a life online. Absolutely nothing like today. So, I knew these comments were coming from friends of people I knew (if only online), and I just couldn’t understand why they were being so shitty.
(Although, since looking back at the few posts I could find… I mean, I don’t want to say I deserved it, because I didn’t, but I can see their points.)
Should I still care about the reasons things happen? Life is so fucking relentless. There’s no time to ask why. It’s more like, well, what’s going to happen next? How am I going to survive the next thing?
That’s not to say that I don’t find joy. I do. At the moment, mostly in the Fat Bears. But I zone out and do my crosswords most mornings and play stupid merge games on my phone. I read every night before bed. Even if it’s only a few minutes, I really try to soak up what little joy there might be in every day.
I don’t think I saw joy that way back then. I needed everything in order. I wanted answers. I needed to know why. I wanted to figure out where all the landmines were so I could avoid them and prevent my life from blowing up.
I look back at that girl I was and feel sorry for her. Her problems were so small, but she felt them so big. But lately, some problems are so big, they’re hard to feel.
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