Permanence

I very recently deleted two years worth of entries on here, starting fresh. It was mostly a whim-I rarely wrote, and there was nothing I truly wanted to save, nothing that revealed anything about myself. Still, it's weird that my only written record of the past few years is gone.

I have been writing about my life on the internet forever, way before oversharing was cool. I had a xanga site in college and my first year of grad school, mostly a way to keep up with my sorority sisters over breaks. In between breaks, I updated every so often with funny conversations I had with my sister or my roomates, what I was reading and what music I was listening to, what movies I liked, people that made my day. It's a snapshot of what I was like for those years. Before that, I kept a livejournal. It still exists, but that point in my life was so sad that it is almost unbearable to read. Again, it's a snapshot. It's good to remind myself how dark things were, and how I got better. And I wrote offline about my life, obsessively, in a paper journal. Between all of that, I have a clear history of 1998-2006. The details-not consequential enough to remember at the time-of what I liked, what I didn't, what made me laugh, who I loved. From those details I can piece together an overarching picture of what I learned, how I grew, who helped me. It tells my story, in a slightly different way than reaching back into my memories does.

It is a bit strange, now, to have a gap in the record. Perhaps because I reached a point in my life where I don't change as fast. Maybe because I'm less interested in myself. I'm much busier, and too tired most days to be introspective. Or maybe because I'm so focused on the big picture-finishing the next paper, finishing grad school and leaving here-that I forget that it's the little details of every day that make up the good parts of life. At any rate, I am trying once again to fill in the record.