This week I discovered that Xanga.com, bastion of early-2000s internet, still breathes.
I kept a blog there right after college, so of course I went searching for it. To my partial relief and disappointment, though, the URL is empty, having been “archived” with the rest of the X-Files fan fiction and Zelda walkthroughs that held up the internet twenty years ago.
However, I did find that by recalling the only password I used in 2005—which may or may not have contained my own name—I could retrieve the zipped files.
I’ve been cringing ever since.
Not entirely unlovingly. There were almost thirty entries to read through, and I do have affection for that aggrieved, celebrity-obsessed young woman just trying to navigate early adulthood, early teacherhood, and the early internet at once. None of us really knew what to use the interwebs for, clearly, and I spent more than one entry waxing philosophical about parents being allowed on Facebook and how to make blogs more mainstream.
Less endearing, though, is that I didn’t seem to know what to use myself for, either.
Mostly, I complained. I complained about working in groups, about small talk at lunch, about the Lost finale. I complained about waiting in long lines, about casting a new Spock when Leonard Nimoy was still a perfectly good one, and about other people’s grammatical choices.
I complained about all the ways I was correct and everyone else was pathetic and misguided, and you can almost see the existential discomfort, the woman trying to wriggle her way out of the girl costume. You can hear the thwack of identities and expectations swatting me over the head every time I gained an inch.
There’s a good deal of internalized misogyny in that blog. I’ve written before that it was the water we were all swimming in, but boy I sure splashed it around. I made fun of female celebrities and Other Girls (oh yes, I was not like Other Girls, you see), and I wrote about my obsession with my diet and weight, even sharing low-calorie “variations” I’d concocted of formerly delicious foods, because that was helpful.
There are hints of internalized racism and ableism, too, along with heaping piles of judgment and arrogance. A trail of footprints leading up the walls and along the ceiling, straight to the closet door we will fling open to reveal ME, a self-absorbed, privileged white girl with no wrong opinions and a cobalt blue iMac.
It’s tempting to stick my arm out and thrust her away. It’s tempting to nuke the entire blog and believe that if I destroy the evidence, I can destroy where I’ve been, too.
But…well, look.
At the end of every school year, I used to ask my eighth graders to create a collection of essays, pictures, and keepsakes we called Time Capsules. It was all about them, their thoughts about the world, their hopes and dreams for the future; a snapshot of the weird and wonderful moment in their lives called middle school. I stored them in giant Rubbermaid containers and handed them back to each class in May of their senior year.
On opening day, seniors would trickle down the eighth grade hallway (small school) to tell me what they’d read and what they’d forgotten. They’d laugh and they’d shake their heads. They’d put their palms to their foreheads and say, “I’m SO embarrassed at the way I used to be.”
That’s when I threw open my arms and said, fantastic! That means you’ve grown as a human over the past four years. I’d be worried if you didn’t find it embarrassing.
This week, I needed to hear that, too.
We’re growing, collectively, super duper fast right now. If you find yourself wincing at things you used to say, or ways you used to show up in the world, or choices you used to think were best, that’s a good thing. Let the icky feeling in, give it a cup of tea to go, and resist the temptation to kick it in the pants on the way out. It’s a side effect of growth.
I, too, am so embarrassed at the way I used to be. Fantastic! It reminds me that I’ve made progress, and that even when I know for CERTAIN that I’m finished, I’m not. It reassures me that someday I will unearth this post, too, and that a kinder, more informed and more enlightened version of me will cringe at how little I knew.
I’m looking forward to meeting her. She sounds awesome.
