The Next Version.

So I deleted all my old posts.

I dispensed with the maudlin and inauthentic.

There's something to be said for keeping a thorough time-stamped archive of where one is at one's various times life for an accurate view of it all. I get being able to reflect on the whole process and appreciating how the low points conspire to make the present for better or for worse. For a moment, I was stuck between being in love with my own words + The Value Of My Experience and not wanting to relive the moments about which I was writing.

I've been reading someone else's past lately. His work for the last several years is Out There Online. Archived by a third party. Uneditable. Not only does this not bother him, I think that he appreciates having his history documented. The researcher and voyeur in me celebrates this unfiltered access. At the same time, the fierce protector of privacy in me sort of recoils.

I first started writing my thoughts down when I was a junior in high school. When I re-read those journals years later, the drivel I had written horrified me. I filled whole books with teenage angst. I remember the smug sense of intellectualism and creativity I felt sitting in independent bookstore coffee shops, flowing my profundity onto the page, to be preserved for posterity.

It almost goes without saying that when I reread these books years later, I was astounded by insufferable and boring content. I somehow managed to write the same thing repetitively in not very new or interesting ways. Lots of syllables, though. Anne Frank I was not.

I tossed the journals into the fire. They no longer exist. Thank string theory. I don't miss them. No one else ever needed to read them.

My next attempt to record my thoughts was a website I created on my MindSpring free FTP space called Defy The Stereotype, inspired by the site written by The Misanthropic Bitch. It was everything 1998 had to offer. Minus the blinking .gifs. I wrote essays on 3rd Wave Feminism (it was the hotness at the time) and aggregated links to women's health sites regarding things like midwifery and pro-choice activism. I was so proud to have been flamed by an anti-choice troll within the first 24 hours of my first posting. And that was before SEO! Then my career demanded more of my time, and my attention wandered. I have no idea what happened to that site, actually. I still have that FTP space and that site's not on it. Unless it's hidden in a directory somewhere. I should check that.

This was followed by a website that features my cross stitch pieces finished in 2002. Apparently that was my form of creative expression in that era. The site promises wedding pics, coming soon! Not likely, given that after 8 years of marriage, I was divorced 2 years ago. The site's still up. Not sure why I haven't pulled it down. I probably should.

Then came this blog in 2005. I was unemployed, grieving for my father, helping my struggling mom out, and trying to juggle the roles of wife and daughter with a husband who was in a place, culture, and climate completely foreign to him in the uncomfortable way.

Some creative types thrive with such conditions. What percentage of my favorite books and CDs were written amid such turmoil in the artist's life?

Suffice to say that nothing I wrote during that era's worth saving for future generations. Not that there was an abundance of content. If anything, there was a dearth. And now it's like it was never there.

I feel better already.