While I'm not proud of the digital footprint of my dickishness on full display, I understand that these are the consequences of my actions and that "the internet is forever" is a statement I should have heeded with a bit more gravity.
From this message, I'm getting the impression that there's clearly come some past comments you feel have aged like milk and perhaps feel they define your whole NWR "persona". Still, I think that is something all of us continuing posters here have had to deal with. Plenty of users of have looked back at older posts of theirs and had some share of embarrassment and cringe about them. The silver lining is that it is kind of a good thing because it also shows and represents personal growth.
In grade 9, I wrote a 46 page short story for a short story writing assignment in English class. Got an A+ and felt great about it. The rest of my classmates had written something that was maybe around 3 pages which I thought was shocking and they felt was a struggle just to reach that length. For awhile there, English was my favorite subject. I thought it was great to be able to come to class and just write away and see where the story and characters and couple ideas I had took me. Then came having to type it all up into a good final copy and that was not so fun. When the deadline came and I handed in my rough draft and notes along with the copy, I had only typed about 40-some of the pages up (it totaled 66 pages when typed up) and mentioned that to my teacher. I still got the A+ even in that state and she asked if I'd finish typing up the rest of it. I guess she didn't want to try to finish it with my terrible handwriting in the rough draft. I was so proud of it that I had no problem doing that and typed up the rest on my own time at home and gave it to her. I later found out she had shown it to a few other of the English teachers at the school. Thinking back, I suppose when teachers usually see most short stories being very short and a few pages that when a student suddenly shows real enthusiasm and effort for that assignment then it may be a morale boost. For me, it was a bit more of an ego boost and pride in what I had accomplished in doing that. I was rather disappointed that the English classes after never had such a writing assignment again.
I bring it up and am reminded of that experience when reading your words and bemoaning the past of your digital footprint. For the rest of high school and a bit after, I viewed that story as one of the best things I ever did in school and proof that I could be a writer which appealed to me as a possible future career. On an occasion here and there, I'd pull it out and read it over again. Sometimes finishing it and sometimes not. But then, one day, while going through my stuff for a move, I pulled it out and started reading it and found it kind of embarrassing and childish. I decided it was time to let it go and tossed it. I recognized that I had matured more in my writing ability and in being able to critique my own work and more knowledge of what good writing is like from having read more since then. Applying it to the forums, I've looked at some stuff I posted some 20() years ago and it just reads so differently now. I don't hear it in the same tone that I remember writing it in. The phrasing could be better. There's a lack of knowledge or understanding about other things I know now. I've just simply changed and grown since then. Personally, I've just found it best to deal with those older posts with any humour I can get out of them. I've bumped them up to point at them and laugh or call my younger self out for their failures. Stephen King won't admit he posts here but I'm pretty sure he does because the NWR Forums are where it's at. He's talked about looking back at novels he wrote and disliking them and that he feels he could have done better job at. But I'm pretty sure "novels" is just his cover word for NWR posts.
As for that short story I tossed many, many years ago, I must admit that nowadays I kind of wished I hadn't. Yes, I'd probably see the story as even more hackneyed than I did when I tossed it but I can now better appreciate that it also just reflects the best I could do at the time and was a snapshot of a moment and time in my life and what was going through my mind then. I think that experience makes me leery when people talk about wanting to delete or have deleted their accounts on all various platforms. It might seem like junking the past is the right choice at the time but then one could change their mind in the future and are now unable to undo that previous choice. I moved a lot in my life. Off the top of my head, I think the number is like 21 times so far. Because of this, there's a lot of items I've tossed and let go of with the result being that I have very few things childhood, teens and even early young adult life. Heck, there were even a couple of other forums and sites I engaged with before I found PGC that have gone defunct and disappeared off the web and I'd like to revisit. "The internet is forever" isn't a statement I've found to be an absolute but I've come to appreciate the longevity these forums have been able to provide in preserving some history of my online growth, warts and all.
Topic: Account deletion? (Read 25535 times)
