Preemptive Retaliation

So I’ve just spent fifteen minutes changing the colour of this website, trying my best to make it the absolute correct shade of Gamecube Purple because I seem to have an affinity with that console and that colour. Try as I might I just couldn’t get it to look right – it just looked a bit off to me. It wasn’t until I had almost given up that I realised I had my blue light filter on, casting everything on my screen a shade of orange. The moment I turned that off, the moment everything became bright and clear for me.

In the end though, it still doesn’t look right. I mean, it’s the right colour, but I don’t think it’s a good blog colour. I’ve been blogging since I was fourteen, and I’ve seen some good blogs with good colours – and this one isn’t one. Still, no one comes here anyway. I’ll keep it for now until I have the inclination to improve it.

When I was editing my home page I saw a few examples of what other people have done with their website introductions. Mostly it’s classy images with brief yet loaded descriptions.

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I took a break in writing this. Two weeks or so, I reckon. As such I’ve lost the thread of my original thoughts. Let’s see if I can find it again, gather it back into the mangled jumper that is this blog.

I think that my thoughts were going to flow into my social media presence, or lack thereof. I’ve had an intermittently intense presence on the internet since my youth. I started young on blogger.com, with an html website that I ran for far too long and had so little of substance to it – but it was there that I cut my teeth on consistent, thoughtful writing. I dallied in LiveJournal which was mostly a place for me to answer quizzes about what anime girl I would be and share music videos, and no joke I just checked the url and it still works.

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Another break. Another thread lost. Well, I know where that thread is and where it leads but I’m not interested in tugging on it for now.

For the past few days I’ve been reading through that old blog of mine. The LiveJournal. Turns out I deleted the old quizlets and used it as a cryptic journal that followed me through my last year in university and then a few months beyond. And boy, if it isn’t the quintessential blog of a 19-year old know-it-all, I don’t know what is. I won’t go over all the times I cringed, because I can forgive myself for that easily enough. I’ve been blogging since I was fourteen – I have plenty more that I can, and have, cringed about. But I will go over the times that were disturbingly familiar.

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Another break. This one for a week. I didn’t want to comment on the old blog until I had read the whole thing, which I’ve only just done. And, boy – do I have some thoughts.

I think this entry stands as front for a small breakdown on my part. This is the benefit of chronically recording your thoughts. You can look back on an entry and pinpoint what you were doing or thinking in the majority of those moments. Those livejournal entries were high water marks on some of the most tumultuous times in my life. Months of parties, drugs, women, heartbreak, insecurity, depression – they weren’t there in the posts. Mostly the posts were unhinged, disturbingly horny rants. But in them I could be transported to different computers, different rooms, different flats, and I could remember what I was doing in each of them.

So this post will do the same I guess. Hello future me, at this time in my life I was having a small mental breakdown. How’re you getting on?

I should delete this whole thing since it’s getting vague and personal, but I promised myself I would write once a month and I’ve written too much to give up on it.

What I find most surprising, and what has really thrown me for a loop, is how similar my thoughts are now to what they were fourteen years ago. I spent more than my fair share of time worrying about writing, and what people thought about my writing, and most importantly this feeling in my chest of anxiety and want – this feeling of wanting to do something, to be something. And all the confusion and impotence and yearning that all that came with. And here I am, doing the same thing in my mid-thirties.

Which is depressing in its own way. Surely I’ve had some character development in fourteen years? Of course I’ve had! I’ve got married and had children and have established a family, and written and (self) published writing, and made and lost friends, and succeeded and failed in a million different ways.

When reading these old, desperate blogs from this foreign twenty year old I kept wanting to just give him a hug. This is so cliched in its own way, but fuck me this guy needed a hug. He needed a hug and someone to listen to him, and someone to tell him that it was all ok. What he was feeling wasn’t true. He had friends who loved him, and respected him, and looked up to him, and he was interesting and cool and so awkward with women that it was actually charming, and to tell him to quit being a misogynist prick, and to base his whole identity on something other than succeeding, and to quit smoking or I guess never start, and to just embrace himself and love himself, because that’s all he can really do.

What struck me most were the people coming out in the comments. The people that read this person’s work, and reacted to what he said, and each time he would shrug it off with a joke or dismiss it outright. These were the people who cared for him, who liked his work and rooted for him. He preferred to imagine the void. He was pouring his thoughts out into nothing, expressing them only for the release of having them expressed.

And I’m fully aware that I’m saying this as I type this blog out to the nothingness of the internet. No one comes here, I see it in the analytics. The only engagement I get on this is through bots. I don’t need people to see this. I don’t need people to read this. This is my space – my yelling into the void, into the crashing sea of voices on the internet. Hello there, by the way. If you are a real person and you are reading this – hello there. I appreciate you, and I hope you think I am a good person. My twenty year old self didn’t think he was a good person, but he had high expectations of me. I likely haven’t met them, but I’m happy with what I’ve done. I’m happy with what I’ve done.