A Resurrection of a Blogger Girl: Unfortunately, I have returned to the internet and have feelings about things

Well, hi. Hi again, or welcome back. Or hi, this is very awkward.

How do you introduce yourself when you’ve been missing for a decade? Or even longer. I can’t remember exactly for how long I have been dead and gone. Clearly, I’ve changed throughout my absent years from publicly writing. And apparently, I have returned to the internet. I really wish I had a more impressive explanation for whatever this right here is. Something dramatic, perhaps. Something involving a profound realization on a rainy night, a sudden encounter with mortality, or at the very least a job offer. Unfortunately, the truth is much less cinematic: I missed writing. Which is an embarrassing thing to admit when you have spent a considerable amount of time pretending you are perfectly capable of living without it. For a while, I stopped. Not entirely, of course. Nobody who has ever owned a phone truly stops writing. I wrote messages. I wrote emails. I wrote captions and grocery lists and increasingly passive-aggressive notes to myself. I wrote haha when I wasn't laughing and I'm fine when I was, objectively, not fine. I wrote things that disappeared the moment they were sent.

But I stopped writing for the sake of writing. Again, not entirely. I stopped writing diaries, or essays on a random thought I had in the middle of the night. But I never stopped writing poems. Or short little texts. After all, I am still a girl with too many thoughts for her own damn good. Still, I am sabotaging everything with overthinking. But I tried to stop taking the strange little thoughts that appeared in my head at inconvenient times and giving them somewhere to live. I stopped turning questions into paragraphs. I stopped wondering whether a completely insignificant Tuesday afternoon might actually be trying to tell me something about the human condition. Or at the very least, I tried to give it a little less room in my head. Which, honestly, was probably healthier for everyone around me. There is a particular kind of person who cannot simply experience something. They have to think about it. Then think about why they thought about it. Then wonder whether other people think about it. Then write three paragraphs about it. Then delete two of them. Then decide the remaining paragraph is pretentious. Then write another paragraph explaining why it is pretentious. I am, unfortunately, this person.

And so here I am again. There is something strange about returning to a place where you used to be yourself. It was my birthday recently. Now, I’m a 30-something-year-old. And I still haven’t figured out who I am or what I want to do with the time I’m given on this planet. I have a strange habit of returning to times or versions of myself I thought I buried six feet underground. The internet is particularly good at preserving old versions of us. Somewhere out there are photographs, usernames, blog posts, jokes, opinions, playlists, terrible profile pictures, and sentences written by versions of ourselves who felt completely certain about things we now barely remember believing. The internet doesn't let you disappear properly. Stop posting, delete the account, change your name, or try to convince yourself that the chapter is over. And yet, somewhere, on some forgotten server, a younger version of you is still sitting there, saying something you wrote at two in the morning with far too much confidence. 

I died. Multiple times, actually. I say this often, and it’s true. I died occasionally. Or I killed myself along the way to this point. Turning older is a funny thing. I never thought I’d make it this far in my life. When I first started writing and publishing my writing on the internet, I was 13 years old. I can’t hold her accountable for the things this little lonely girl felt, or how she acted, or the things she wrote during those nights. She was a child, after all. My sleep schedule hasn’t change since then. I just learned a new expression I can’t fully understand: sleep hygiene. But that’s a topic for a whole other post. This teenager died, this bachelor’s student died, the woman i used to be before a seven-year relationship died, the single woman died, this eldest daughter died. Perhaps that's why returning to writing feels a little like resurrection. You aren't bringing back the person you used to be. You're simply walking into the graveyard of your former selves and realizing that some of them still have things to say.

I don't know exactly what this will become. Maybe essays. Maybe observations. Maybe unnecessarily long examinations of questions that could have been answered in a single sentence. Maybe I'll disappear again.

But for now, I have returned. I dug myself out of my own grave, and I have no idea (since I am no fortune teller, unfortunately) when it’s time to bury her again. If ever. But why exactly write and publish it on the internet? After all, this will not reach a lot of people. But that’s not the goal for me. The times I died and came crawling back, I needed something or someone I could ask for help. I am not a religious person, but some nights I prayed and begged for some greater entity to save me. I talked to a friend the other day. We went out and grabbed a few drinks. I shared my thoughts about returning to writing, which I had never done before. Most of the people in my life don’t (or didn’t know) I was writing endless texts. Only a few of my friends have already read my poems. She said to me that I should just write and publish stuff. It doesn’t matter anyway. She’s right. Of course she’s right, she’s clever and fun. But this is also a topic for another time. So, if I can make anyone reading this feel less alone in this world then I have served my purpose well. 

So. Hi. Again. I resurrected myself. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I still have thoughts. And, even more unfortunately, I still have feelings about them.