I was chatting with one of my co-workers and someone asked her how she got into tech. She said she was inspired as a user of livejournal, and memories started flooding back to me.
I have six years of my memories archived at livejournal, from 2001 to 2006. I almost wish it had existed earlier, because I have almost no record of my thoughts and emotions prior to 2001. Back then on livejournal, nobody cared who we wrote for, whether it was getting any traffic. We simply wrote our hearts out and broadcasted our moods.
I wrote for myself back then, and I still want to write for myself now. I think this is why I am back to writing whenever I have the space and time to write, because my memories are precious to me. I don’t realize how precious they are to me until more than a decade later I am sitting here trying to recollect and you have no idea how thankful I am to my past self for consistently writing during those six years.
I gradually moved to more topical writing, but I really miss those livejournal days when I’m just really just journaling without any agenda or purpose. Those entries are like a time machine for me.
I still smile at my old dramatic ridiculous self, and it amazes me how far I’ve come. And here lies one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about my self and life and general. Our past selves are not a great indicator of who we can become.
The people who knew me when I was 21 (including myself) would laugh their toes off if I told them I would be the person I am today. This is what I tell myself now, that I have absolutely no idea who I will be or what I will be doing in ten years time.
How would my 43 year old self react to the 33 year old me? I hope I will make her proud. I laugh at my 20s self, but there were things that remained constant – my desire to question and analyze every single bit of my life.
Thinking of my current self and the one in my early 20s, even though it seemed like a quantum leap if you put them both side by side, I could find intricate details in my accumulative journal entries that showed the early trajectory of the person I am today. This is from an entry on May 6th, 2002:
What is real, really? Who are we to define what is real?
I am anticipating all that amusement that I will derive from looking back at all my writing, decades from now, over and over again.