i made a new year's resolution (well, i made a few of them, actually) that i would write for at least an hour a day. i've been really good at keeping up with it. i toyed with the idea, at first, that i would post every hour+ of writing on my blogger blog, but sometimes i write things that, i dunno, i don't want to share because they're too personal, or too new, or too dark or too painful or too inclined to have people worry about me unnecessarily, so i haven't done that. but i do post there pretty regularly, when i feel like i have anything to say that's not gonna get me in trouble or, i dunno, frighten some future employer.
it's been a long work week, and it's only wednesday. (well, thursday morning, if you want to get technical.) i've been having a hard time sleeping lately (lately... the last three months? that's lately, right?) and this week especially. it's hard to deal with because my day job is so physically exhausting, but i get to bed and it's like i didn't get to use my brain enough during the day, so i can't shut my head down enough to sleep. guess it's pretty standard insomnia. and when i do sleep, i have strange dreams, so i almost want to avoid it. anyway... that's my current state of mind, since it's 2:20 AM and i'm here typing this.
guess what i did? i went back and read through the whole old kissing booth thread on the s2. oh man, i was cracking up and trying not to be sick and going bug-eyed and rolling my eyes and crying... i ached for that me, i felt so bad for her! she was so silly. well-meaning, but silly and clueless. i was a little embarrassed for her, even. like, i'm sorry you guys ever had to read that slop, oh my god. (though there were bits that weren't too bad. if we ever took up romance novels, we might give danielle steel a run for her money.) i'm kind of glad it was there, though, to localize the plague of pent-up hormones, quarantine it, if you will. i admit, it was quite the page turner, though. i guess it was back in its heyday, too, right? ha.
it just fascinated me. there was this morbid curiosity or something that made me start my digging in that thread. all those old threads, that whole forum, fascinates me. i want to always have it there to go back to. just so there's some magic that will always make me feel 20 again, no matter what happens, because that's what it does. god, i go back and i am right back there, down in my little room, on my little shitty piecemeal, home-built computer from my dad's spare parts, that was given to me for the sole purpose of doing my college homework. (oh, college, that's another night - week's - 's writing entirely.)
college was scaring the shit out of me, honestly. i was this new art major at this big ass mormon university... suddenly in classes where - shock and horror - i wasn't the best artist. i was so used to that, that was my schtick all growing up - from 4 to 19, those years things really matter - i'd built myself around everyone else's perceptions and expectations of me as "the artist." i majored in it because everyone told me i was crazy not to... not because i really wanted it. no wonder i quit. i couldn't handle having my whole paradigm of self as valuable to the world completely shattered realizing i wasn't as special as i'd always thought i was - in that way, at least.
i buried myself there, you know. on the s2. i crawled into those lines, those millions of words, those stupid emoticons, and wrapped them around me. i wanted somewhere safe to figure out who i was. to be worth something again. and it was safe. it wasn't a bunch of crazy mormon neighbors. it was a bit of everything from bits of everywhere, and i didn't get judged, i didn't get a giant scarlet A pinned to me. i just got to... be. and i took that an ran. i just was... all over that place.
i go back and read those forums and, fuck, it raises so many me's from the dead. all those old ghosts... i read the melodrama i bled into the walls of that place, and the stupid jokes, the antics, the... everything... and i see in those things, not just the surface words, but i see that twenty year-old chels, so scared and hurting behind it all. just wanting friends and something to make her feel worthwhile and not sure what to do or how to get it, so she tried some of everything. i really did, i carved myself open over those months, years, even and bled all over it. exorcised the confusion and the loneliness and buried it in-between those lines.
i fell in love, with the acceptance, the friendship, the warmth. the unfathomable closeness that we all somehow knit, meshed together, into this giant hammock we could just stop and be in. i fell in love hard with all of you, with the idea of you. with the idea of that place. with individuals. fell into love that i didn't know what to do with once i realized i was there, because it had never happened that way before. oh, for all the smooth talk, i was floundering. it's so painfully obvious, going back and reading it, that it makes me laugh until i'm crying and vice versa every time i do go back.
i go back so often, in the bumps and stumbles of life, when i get thrown some unexpected curveball and strike out on what was surely going to be my home run swing. i come back, here, to retrace steps. to learn something new. to find the wisdom of self-discovery that is still tucked in all those - all these - lines. oh, it's cheesy and silly and doesn't make sense to lots of people. but when i'm hurting and vulnerable, i feel pulled back to you. i crave the comfort of your acceptance and forgiveness and friendship and forgetting. it's a home to me, a little hidey-hole that i can escape to no matter where i am, to get my bearings, to reset.
to remind myself that every life, even one like mine, so full of mistakes and stumbles and silliness, is worth something - to someone - somewhere - somehow. and there is strength in that, momentum in it, warmth, that shouldn't be so easily discounted. so simply swept aside.
i just know that, more often than not, i find myself back here... finding myself. and it gives me those sparks and nudges to keep going that, perhaps and regardless of how sad it sounds, i don't get anywhere else.
i like finding myself here. it was like my first love. in more ways than even i will probably ever know.