Archives for Category "Weblogs & Citizen Writing"
November 4, 2007
Remembering Often Makes me Cringe
Xeney just put up a post noting, among other things, that she's been online-journalling for 10 years. She writes:I do read my own archives, not often, but at times when I need to. And sometimes they make me cringe, but more often they make me nostalgic, like looking at bad photographs from ten years ago: at the time you want to burn those photos because you look fat or you have bad hair or you can't believe you ever wore that plaid thing, but years down the road you just marvel at how young you were, at how much you still had to learn. Years later you cut yourself some slack and wish you'd gone a little easier on that girl.I don't think there's ever been a time in my life when I didn't look back 5 years and just cringe at myself. It's why I tend not to read my archives, actually, or look at old pictures, or reflect much at all, because I just end up embarrassed with myself. (Of course, I'm the type who can still remember things that happened in 5th grade and be embarrassed about them.) Things I wish I'd done differently, not done, or thought to do. It's almost never about what clothes I wore or car I drove or anything like that - it's usually some interaction or way of doing things that I just wish I'd been smarter, smoother, or more mature about. Probably the people who were the other parts of those interactions don't remember at all (I can hope, anyway), but if I think back too much, I start remembering all sorts of crap I wish I'd done differently or better. TheGuy would say that I'm altogether too hard on myself and that's probably true on a level. It's a hard, hard habit to break, though.
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