My[ugly]space

Every now and then I foray back into the dark and cobwebbed cave that is Myspace. Don't ask me why; my fingers simply tap on my trackpad a few times and I log on. Had I not chosen the same password for the majority of my online accounts, I would no longer be able to access it. But lord knows I could never remember more than one password, so I can quite easily look back into the most profound conversations of my high school years (this is both sarcastic and sincere).

I used to have conversations—or, perhaps more appropriately, 'convos'—via Myspace messaging obsessively. Seing "Re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re:" and so on in my inbox was not uncommon. (Around 2009 they finally got a clue and stopped adding an extra 're:' for each reply). I loved having long, deep, sometimes dramatic and spiteful, sometimes loving and smart interactions with my closest friends—as well as current and past love interests.

I'm mostly embarrassed. Honestly. I chose to guilt people, to fight against their feelings, to stay angry and drudge up old feelings, using them as weapons against others and myself. As much as I thought I was mature, I wasn't. Not really. I wanted to be right, I wanted others to understand me. Don't we all? I didn't allow myself to just accept what other people felt and appreciate that they were feeling at all. I succumbed to the manipulation of significant others and refused to let friends help me... see the light, in a sense. To understand that I was being treated poorly.

All that said, reading back through those long paragraphs, I am sort of amazed by how much I was thinking and feeling. What was going through my mind and how deep everything ran within me. I wasn't afraid to feel, to love, to question. Maybe I went about it in the wrong way sometimes, but I was learning and finding my way through adolescence, which, upon reflection, was even more trying than I initially thought. (In some ways. In other ways, it was a cake walk and holy shit sometimes I wish my problems now were that simple and insulated. But come back in ten years and I'll be saying the same thing about this time in my life. So it goes).

I'm happy that I can look back on those words and know that I've grown and changed so much since then. It's comforting that I know I would never utter some of those words. Also scary that I did. But thankfully, I had some good, less dramatic qualities that kept people around, and I'm so very grateful that they could see past the crazy shit and appreciate me for what I was striving to become.

I'm not there yet, but I think I'm well on my way, and I can only appreciate the reminders of how far I've come.