Journal

I’m calling this a reunion, not an anniversary. I feel like I’m revisiting myself more than celebrating the passing of time.

When I was going through the archives of the website I found a document that I had clearly written around the time I was shutting down the site, but I don’t think it was ever published.

Let me tell you a story about a girl. She was about 20 years old, and her boyfriend jokingly asked if he could post a picture of her online because she’d was wandering around the house in a towel. Her first thought was, ‘I can’t!’ and then a voice in her head that she would learn to love said, ‘But why can’t you?’.  With a simple dare to herself to push her own limits, her journey began. As she walked to work the next day, she was buoyed by the feeling that she had a secret, that she had dared do what most people will not. She felt alive and more comfortable in her own skin.

Fast forward to this girl at 24. She was devastated when her world was turned upside. Her work was her life, and she loved every minute of it, and it had been taken away from her. The days blend into each other as she fills out resumes and stares into the sunlit leaves of the tree behind her desk wondering how to pay her bills, if she’d have to leave the life she loves, and falling into deep despair. Her friends and a furry little cat with big green eyes that called the girl her own were the only things that kept her hanging on. Her ‘But why can’t you?’ voice had challenged her to push her own limits and now she was afraid of losing it all.

Fast forward to this girl at 28.  She weathered through unemployment and had a new appreciation for her job and security. She’s fallen in love and fallen out of love. She knows more than she did at 20, but less than she will tomorrow.  She’s learned to be accountable for her actions whether the camera is on or not. She’s learned to speak her mind even when it may be unpopular and she’s learned that sometimes the fight just isn’t worth fighting. She’s learned what’s important in her future, but she won’t compromise to get there.

Ah, the conviction at 28. I mean, she wasn’t entirely wrong. I’d continue to believe I was being uncompromising on what was important. Namely, starting a family. A strong desire to become a mother has remained steadfast with me, and that drove me to a variety of compromises in the end.

But back to the beginning… did sharing my life on the internet ever make me feel completely comfortable in my own skin, or more importantly, confident in myself? No. It was just a way to find external validation for things I wasn’t mature enough yet to recognize. It was a crutch. It worked, kind of, but never addressed the underlying issues.

And that period at 24. Ooof. That has some of the highest highs and lowest lows. Being laid off and then struggling to find work again when the ‘dot-com bubble burst’ has left indelible marks. I became far more risk averse financially when I finally got back in to tech. As a result I stayed way too long at a company simply for the security and was fucking miserable. I had little appetite to revisit wondering if I could maintain my life and so my descension in to hyper independence began.

And that vaguely poetic “in love and out love”… in that time period I met what I’ll call my first “forever love” and we were both too immature to figure it out. Despite the public front I put on at the time, and all my attempts at love since, never quite nailed it. I mean, obviously I didn’t then either.

Learning when to speak up and when to fight the fight… that one is a little complex. I learned some level of base maturity, but ultimately kept right on people pleasing. I avoided a whole lot of the fights that I should have been fighting because it would make things “easier”.

I did still learn accountability for my actions, a bit imperfectly but far better than I had.

I had one thing completely right back then… I know more today than I did then and less than I will tomorrow.

I’m going through a bit of a self-created personal crisis, or maybe a personal renaissance. As I’m looking towards wrapping up my master’s in psychology I’m dealing with a little bit of “what’s next?” Also spending over two years waist deep in psychology, particularly with my focus on child development, is bound to effect change. I’m in a new season of life for me, and I have all sorts of questions about the meaning of life, of love, of relationships, happiness, healing, grief. I think I’m coming to terms that I will never figure out much of it, and maybe I’m not even going to reach “good enough” status. I think the beauty is still in the trying. The questioning. The consideration.

I’m in the unique position to have some sort of archive of my “early years” through the history of this site. IYKYK. I’ve been triggered to revisit some of that. Virtually revisiting your 20-something self is not for the faint of heart. With my current perspective I can see more of the patterns, the wrong turns, those moments where you want to yell at the TV, “don’t do it!” But there are still those glimpses of the little moments that make up a whole life. The trips with friends, the romances, the casual description of falling asleep on a friend’s shoulder. The little moments that seemed like nothing at the time but are really everything in reflection.

From this vantage, and my enduring tendency for nostalgia and fanciful thinking, it’s still hard to take fault with the girl trying to figure it all out back then. Do I have regrets? Yes. But I also think regrets don’t have to cause us to get stuck today. I can not alter the past. I can only choose differently. On the whole I don’t regret the website – never have. My regrets are mostly in the collateral damage of the people, the relationships. But isn’t a life really just a person bumbling around coming in to contact with other people? It’s going to leave marks and impressions as we collide and are sent spinning away only to collide in to another. Maybe our paths will collide again, and we will leave new impressions, maybe we won’t. I think only in hindsight can you fully understand the magnitude of the impressions we leave on each other or ourselves. And at 25, there’s little hindsight to be had.

I’m not sure what this is going to become or if it’s anything at all. There’s obviously a lot more story to tell, but for anyone that might have a moment of nostalgia and come here looking… these are just the facts of the life that has been lived:

I’m now on the cusp of 49. I’m embarrassingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, twice divorced. I have a child that was born when I was 44. I retired from corporate work in high tech at 46. While working, I finished a B.S. in Environmental Sciences in 2019. As mentioned, I’m in the last leg of a M.S. in psychology with a focus on child development. Many of the friends from the “old days” are still friends and family today.

Despite the life lived I’m generally happy, but there is always room for improvement.

While I’m not actively dating, I’m open to love again. I will always be a hopeless romantic. <Insert half serious joke about accepting applications or referrals>