Okay, so it is totally weird that OD is gone. I was feeling pretty apathetic about it, actually, until I woke up at 5:30 this morning with my mind racing, going, "OH MY GOD IT'S OVERRRR. IT'S OVERRRR!!! WAHHH!!!"
Then I dreamed I wrote an entry about how I was going back through all of my entries and found all of these pictures from my later college years and wow, such cool memories. Etc.
Obviously, I downloaded my diary, and I am not bothered at all by the fact that all of that writing is no longer out there on the internet to be read by others. In some ways, that's kind of nice, actually - there is something slightly intimidating, for me, about the thought of having myself of nearly fourteen years ago still documented so well and so accessibly. It's not that I was "so stupid" or "so naive" or any of that back then - I was, of course, we all were - but just that the thought of having a clear snapshot of my innermost thoughts at 19, and 22, and 25 makes me feel...frozen in time, almost? Like my life is a series of static snapshots, rather than a dynamic, evolving process that is, for the most part, under my control.
I dunno, maybe that doesn't make sense to anyone else. But I am not sad to let go of all of my past that's been documented there. I still have the entries saved, and I can't imagine that any of it is stuff I would care to share with the world again.
What DOES bother me is just the fact that this thing, this place, that was ALWAYS THERE...is just gone. I did sometimes wonder if we would all still be around and writing on OD when we were like 70. I mean, why not, right? And what a cool thing - to have friends from all over whose lives you've been following since you were all like 20 (or whatever...some of us were older when we started writing there, but young and inquisitive in spirit :)). It's just one of those home-hitting reminders that life is change, that everything ends. (This is about to get slightly depressing, sorry.) The way I feel about it reminds me a little bit of the way I felt when I graduated high school, two weeks after I started writing on OD. When you are 14, 15, 16, years feel like eternities, and it seemed like graduation would never actually happen, like high school would truly just go on forever...and when it didn't, that was the first time that it really sunk in for me that one day I would die. This feels ever-so-slightly similar in that way.
HAPPY CHEERFUL THOUGHTS YAY. Sorry.
Anyway. In some ways, it is nice to have a fresh internet-start - though I am eternally grateful to have all the same folks be part of that fresh start.
I thought about writing out some stuff trying to capture all of the important things that happened in my life over the nearly 14 years I wrote on OD...except I realized that pretty much EVERYTHING important that has EVER happened in my life, besides, you know, going to school and doing kid stuff, happened during those 14 years. It would kind of be a recap of my entire adult life.
So I guess I will just leave it at a forward-looking fresh start. I am 31, childless (for now, by choice), in a solid relationship, relatively settled, neither super happy nor super unhappy with my job, reasonably content with life, and making some cool plans for the future that I think are going to help me get closer to where I want to be. It has really only been the past 18 months of my life, since I ditched grad school and got an actual income-earning job, that I have started on what feels like a life trajectory, rather than just aimless wandering - and in that time, a fair amount has happened, actually. And so I am truly looking forward to what the next year, two years, however many years will bring.
........
Edit: Oh yeah, P.S. - My cat is fine. She has an ear infection that is probably just from wax buildup, and she's on some heavy-duty antibiotics. Her balance is not supposed to correct for another week or so, but she has adapted to being off-kilter just fine, in a way that makes it kind of hilarious, actually, because she'll just knock herself over sometimes and not seem fazed by it at all. Adorable. Anyway, she'll be fine.
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