posted 2026-09-12 03:25:09
I spent the better part of 12AM-3AM trying to remember what password I would have used at age 17 or age 16 or 14.
Once I admitted defeat, and embraced that 18 years of memorized passwords and secrets is too thick a barrier, I started flipping through my older entries.
It felt a bit like picking through a thicket of wild blackberries after peak season; looking under leaves for berries that aren't too soft from the humidity or too eaten by bugs. Looking for...searching for, wondering and being entertained at my brain before so much happened to it.
It's funny seeing what I thought of the world, it seems like it was mostly ruminating over crushes and processing the early stages of mental illnesses that I had no words for yet, chasing after weed and alcohol and escape and sex. My current partner laughed at some of my teenage recollections a few weeks ago, he called me a bad kid. I laughed at his wonder at my delinquency. But looking back, yeah I really was a bad kid.
I'm 36 in a few weeks now, I wonder what teenage me would think of that. I'm sure she didn't expect to make it to this age and could not imagine a world this far away.
But if she did imagine herself in her mid 30's I think she would've imagined us living in a studio apartment in NYC making a full living as an artist and writer with a lover who was obsessed with me and I them.
Instead I live in a home not far away from where I wrote those entries between 2006-2008 and before on the old hatelife. With a wild garden (teenage me would've liked the garden) I do make a living as an artist but certainly not a thriving one by any measure. I stopped writing fiction entirely after events in 2010-she wouldn't like that fact at all, that in a few short years her well for writing would be shut off entirely and filled back in with concrete.
Though I do have a lover obsessed with me, like all things, it's complicated. I'm sure teenage me would be disappointed I wasn't married by now, and honestly, as I reckon with selling the wedding dress I purchased for a wedding that never happened, 35 year old me is pretty disappointed about that too.
I was chuffed to see how much had not changed about me either.
In 2008 I wrote:
All in all:
I'm still a vegan
I still have poor jugement skills
I still make the same mistakes
I still failed math
I still graduated
I still smoke
I'm still as silly as yesterday
I'm still as twisted up as to what religion I'll subscribe to as before.
Dancer in the Dark was still the only movie that made me cry.
Radiohead is still awesome.
I still don't like cucumbers.
I'm still blind as a bat
~~~~~~
I am still a vegan, it's year 24 or something like that.
I didn't ever develop good judgement skills.
I do indeed still make the same mistakes, something about neural pathways or something
I eventually passed my math classes.
I did indeed graduate.
I stopped smoking, only about 9ish months ago.
I'm still as silly but in a different genre.
I feel less conflicted about religion, I've lived the bulk of my life at this point as a Muslim woman, though the more I learn about early human religions the more I'm willing to entertain religion writ large is just a series of stories we keep telling to one another and mistranslating.
Dancer in the Dark is still the only movie to have moved me to tears. I can't think of another movie that's made me sob outright.
I stopped listening to Radiohead these past 2 years but they are intwined in nearly all my previous playlists like a tumorous growth.
I actually do love cucumbers now, not sure what all that was about.
And yes, still blind as a bat.
I still knit and up until a month ago I still had my turtle. When I was looking back at my entries I was heartened to see the small mentions here and there about my precious cold blooded pet. He died exactly a month ago at the age of approximately 22.
Last night I had a dream that he was sick and I had him under heating lamps, but he suddenly started to thrash and pieces of his shell came sloughing off of him.
I tried to help pull some of his scutes off but he was in agony so I thought to rinse him off in the sink. But as the water ran over him, his shell started to dissolve. I held him in my hands and started running for help. I held him and ran through the darkness of night looking for my partner to help me, looking for more light to assess my beloved. He began to shrink and shrink until he was just a tiny marble in my hand. I started to cry and asked "why do I have to do this again? why is this happening? he already died."
The dream was a little on the nose for how I spent the months of July and August. Seeing my boy decline day after day and not respond to antibiotics, trip after trip to the vet for help for imaging for fluids. Sleepless nights watching him sleep under heat lamps and checking that he was still alive and still fighting. Trying different meds, trying to get him to eat. At the end he couldn't swim anymore so I held him in my hand and guided him through shallow warm water. There was nothing I could do to save him, like the dream, he just dissolved in my hands- of course, not literally mind you. But he did waste away before my eyes. In June he was about 350 grams, when he died he was 264.
But all this time he was here, so many houses and moves, 2 states, after becoming estranged from my family, he was my constant companion.
I still haven't the heart to break down his tank, empty and sanitize it. Everyday I say that I need to do it today but I still haven't managed it.
Maybe today.