I’m fortunate not to have all the details of my early adulthood chiseled into the immortal stone surface of the internet.
Facebook materialized midway through my university career, and the majority of what was shared by me and my peers before and just after that were, much like our flip phones and the specifics of our MySpace Top 8s, lost to history.
There’s still evidence of my early internet existence out there, though.
I started writing for newspapers back in high school, and some of those publications have since been digitized. But I really hit my e-writing stride in 2009, when I booted up my blog, Exile Lifestyle. I’d dabbled with blog posts prior to that, mostly for clients. But the work I shared on EL was all about me and my thoughts and my life, and for better and for worse that served as the basis for much of what I made after.
I say “for better and for worse” because, looking back at my early writings, I feel the same full-body cringe I experience when I stumble across a photo of myself from high school, or resurface one of my news analysis pieces from 2002. In some ways I was surprisingly well informed, and not entirely wrong about everything. But these flash-frozen artifacts also capture all my misconstruals, all the off-registration understandings, all the not-yet-solved internal issues. They’re maybe not as obvious to everyone, but to me they stand out like neon road hazard signs.
Given the option, I wouldn’t pull all that earlier work from the web—no matter how embarrassing and (to my modern eyes) superficial, off-kilter, or incomplete. Different sorts of information can be useful at different stages of our lives and journeys. Consequently, some of what I made back then will resonate more with some readers than the work I’m making today.
It’s also valuable, I think, to look back at where we’ve been so we can better appreciate where we are now.
I try to remind myself that each era of life is just a blip on a larger timeline, and the things I currently think are vital, the most important stuff in the world, may seem quaint, even laughably so, to a future version of me. But that’s okay. In fact I hope that continues to be the case, as it means I’ve grown in the intervening years. And all those prior versions, with all their flaws, ignorances, and naïvetés, were necessary steps along the way to becoming who I am today, and who I’ll become in the future.
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