(no subject)

 

I've lost so much content over my years online....usenet posts, orkut,friendster, myspace, yahoo, G+, diaryland....my exs domain/website/email server, and I have little to no organic memory. Stuff comes up from time to time, and sometimes its nice but a lot of times its just embarrassing and awful....

in Dec, Yahoo Groups went away and I tried to salvage as much as I could from a private yahoo group that I was using as a private online journal of sorts. I've been cutting and pasting it into Dreamwidth here, backdating as appropriate....and I'm burning out on that project. I don't like the 'me' that I was. It's unpleasant to keep seeing how mean, petty, manipulative, gossipy, and drama-addicted I was. I was especially cruel to my SIL..not that she isn't a garbage truck in her own right, but damn. I was pretty awful to her. The gossip, backstabbing, manipulation attempts..all very ugly. I was an unhappy person back then. I was being bullied at work, and subjected to emotional and financial abuse at home, with occasional bits of physical abuse thrown in to the mix. If I was clumsy and accidentally bumped into him or stepped on his toe, he'd very deliberately do it back, only harder, with his strength and his big heavy shoes against my relative weakness and bare feet...but, whatever. Unhappy person or no. "Hurt people hurt people" is a weak non-excuse. I know how shitty it is to be treated like that and I did it to others. I wasn't a good person. I dont' like myself when I look back at that person. I consider it a blessing not to remember any/most of that stuff on my own.  But there was some good stuff too. And isn't there some value in being able to see where I've been in order to recognize and appreciate where I am now, to see that even though I'm not 100% happy with myself now, I've changed and grown in some important ways, and perhaps become a better person, at least a little?  I'm certainly in a better workplace and have a much better home life these days.

I go back and forth..retrieve and preserve or let it go ? And so much of my clutter in my house is the same. Mementos, photos, objects....none of it relevant except to me and maybe a handful of other people....will lose relevance in less than a generation. What am I saving it for, why can't I let it all go? As Sarah says in Labyrinth: it's all junk. Immobilizing junk. The past is a trap. Slow moving amber.