Writing?! I feel old...

So writing in general does not make me feel old. It makes me feel good, and sparkly, and smart. I thoroughly enjoy writing. I find what makes me feel old is reading writing I wrote in days of yore. Yuck.

So I just googled my old-slash-junk email address to see what came up, and one of the three or four results was...(dun, dun, DUN) my old xanga. Ugh. It pains me even to type the word xanga. It seems like such an emo-kid thing looking back at it. I know normal people had-slash-have xangas, but for me, I got it during a period where I was like, into Christian rock (not K-love-contemporary stuff, but like legit rock), and legitimately emo. I didn't even know I ever was! One of my sundry and divers bffs (aren't I glamorously popular) is reading all her old journals, and we're finding out she was legitimately emo too. I thought I was a pretty chill teenager, like I'm a pretty chill adult right now. I don't stress too much, I try not to whine a lot, and I would consider myself a super happy person, relative to most of the world.

But wow, was I ever wrong about my old-timey self. I kept the xanga for basically my junior year of high school. As 21 year old me remembers, junior year was like my fave teenage year. I had the most fun at school--senior year would've been more fun if my school bff didn't die in the middle of it, buuuuuut...she did, so not as much fun as it could've been. I promise, I'm not trying to be emo right now. :) I've healthily worked through that deal, seriously. But so in my memory, junior year was for serious good times, albeit busy ones. But reading that xanga, wow. I WAS EMO. It makes me want to cry. And privatize all the posts. Which I've since done. I'm keeping them so maybe one day if the Lord leaves us and gives me teenagers--my own kid form, or cool aunt-niece-nephew type--I can prove to them that I really do know what it's like to be emo and teenagerly.

And I would not have wanted to be friends with my old self. It seemed like I spent the whole time posturing, saying stuff that, looking back, was obviously an attempt to coolify myself or something, and listening to music that I pretended was all top-forty-deviant, and mature for me to have picked...I was...I don't even know. not such good times.

Like I've read bloggish things, and like myspaceish stuff of different teenagers, and I'm always struck with a do-you-think-life-is-really-like-this type reaction, and think like, get over it, teenage life is not that crazy. It was scary though, because I got the same exact feeling reading my own blog from being seventeen. I'm just glad that nearly five years are now separating me from my 17 year old self. I went through an old journal the other day, where I said something about being embarrassed to read some of it "five years from now," when I realized that it had legitimately already been five years since I wrote it.

I've consciously felt like a separate entity from my thirteen and fourteen year old journal self, but this is the first time I've ever realized how much I've changed since even my older high school years. Like last time I re-read my xanga stuff, which, granted, was like 2 years ago or something, I remember being kind of proud of how funny it was. So I was excited to find it again, but once I started reading, I was like, how could I ever have liked that I wrote this?! It was just as embarrassing to read 17-year-old-me's journal at 21 as it was to read 13-yr-old-me's journal at 17. Makes me feel kind of old, that I can't connect to my teenage self anymore.

And I just want to say right now, if I ever start blogging like an emo, teenagerly little girl, please slap me well upside my head. I don't even know. And my new prayer is that I've somehow become a better writer than what I apparently used to think was good. Yuck. We'll see how like, 30 year old me looks at this blog. Ipes. Time is so weird...