Yesterday, at like 10pm, I got an urge to take out my very old and chonky Dell laptop. I didn’t remember quite how old it actually was – Stace was able to look up the service number, and it was purchased in November 2003. I used it regularly until about 2007, and a few times in 2009 from what I can tell.
It was a disorienting early 2000’s time capsule, which I expected, but wasn’t able to meaningfully access the internet anymore, which I was not expecting. Something about a bookmarks folder full of hundreds of dead links that I’d never be able to access again was jarring. There’s a whole era of the internet that’s just… gone. This is not an original thought, and the reason why the wayback machine exists, but it still sucks.
But that’s not the thing I came here to write about… I found a folder full of old writing. It’s definitely backed up elsewhere, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to read it in its natural habitat. I went through most of it, until 5am cause I’m an idiot, and like every time I do this sort of thing, by the end I felt very weird.
The weird feeling always happens, like I forget who I am for a couple of hours, like I’m reading about someone else. I don’t know if other people feel this way about their younger selves; maybe it’s a function of having so much written down. It has a “watching a car crash in slow motion” quality.
I kind of hate who I was from 21 to 24 or so. I was so fucking dramatic, and ungrateful, and self centered. But I was also deeply anxious and depressed, with some raging undiagnosed ADHD thrown in for good measure. One thing that stood out yesterday, in the disjointed chronology of poems and journal entries and AIM conversations, is how the systems that should have helped me out of that hole failed me over and over.
I’ve written about this before. The dismissive primary care doctors and school administrators, the unaccommodating and unsympathetic counseling department at Simmons. I kept reaching out, knowing something was really wrong, but kept getting told it wasn’t bad enough, I wasn’t sick enough, until suddenly I was sleeping through all my classes and not leaving my dorm room and self injuring and getting blackout drunk all the time. But what struck me for the first time last night was one sentence, buried in a journal entry about the meds I’d been taking for a month at that point: “Also, noticing colors more. Things seem a bit physically brighter, I feel more ‘here.'”
How fucking depressed had I been? And for how long? No wonder I was such an asshole.
I still don’t really like who I was or how I acted back then. But having one concrete reason I can point to is comforting. I was trying to claw my way out of a hole I’d been in for years, without much of a support system, without the resources of the modern internet and, let’s be honest, some shitty attitudes about mental health that wouldn’t begin to change for at least another decade.
I said a long time ago that this blog wasn’t for drama and was only gonna be about crafting and baking and nice photos. But it’s good to have a place to write this out. Life isn’t all fun hobbies and good food. Honestly, it’s like 75% shit, at least lately. But being able to look back and know I handled things the best I could, and that I’m way, way better at handling them now, feels useful.