Today I’m looking back at some longform essays I’ve written as blogs on other parts of the internet and thinking that the world—or at least my world—was better when that was the way we primarily communicated before shortform content rotted all of our brains (and here I am @ing myself).

I think the thing that skeeves me out when it comes to writing longform content, which is to say exposing more of my innermost thoughts and feelings than can fit into an extremely cultivated PR-friendly soundbyte, is the fact that the internet is forever and the things we post here never really die. It’s less that I’m afraid I’ll say something offensive and more that I’m afraid my cringe will live on forever, long after I’ve stopped believing whatever it was I’ve said, or that saying it is a good idea.

But you know, as cringy as I find some of the things I’ve posted on the internet two, five, ten years ago, it’s fascinating to see the record of who I’ve been and what I’ve believed so strongly as to write it down and make it public. And often, too, there are little bits of wisdom there that I’ve forgotten, or else I think that past version of me is braver than I am now.

My therapist would point out that if you were to ask that old version of myself, they would say the same thing; it’s easy to glamorize the past and harder to admit that more or less, we are made of the same stuff in perpetuity. Same cringe, same bravery, same heart.

I am cringing already.

But cringe is dead, or something. And it does occur to me at times that no one will really know me if I never let myself be known. Maybe there’s another essay coming sometime soon about how the recent insane-person drama in a fandom I’m involved in has seriously wigged me out and given me a stomachache for the last week, and how I have inexplicably found a new hobby this year and that hobby is “pencils.”

I’m basically always just trying to make interesting work, share other people’s interesting work that I find, and to generally be a force of kindness and goodness in the world. You know, no big deal.