The lines that draw us together
I am on Blogspot, and it is the year 2010, clearly, from the default template that greets me, complete with 38x38px floral background tile on repeat. My curiosity, piqued from a line in a recent news article, has sent me to this far-flung corner of the internet—for how can I not be curious when it has to do with a blog? The spike in the pageview counter in the left column reveals that I am not alone in my venture here to these remote parts, but I suppose we are all only human in all our wonderings.
It doesn’t take me long to finish reading the twenty-four published entries, though I did require more time for the posts written in Chinese, which I painstakingly read but surprisingly understood. I read about the life of a young woman almost my age during the time she spent living abroad.
She starts a blog after moving to a new country that speaks a language she does not understand in order to talk to herself in a language she knows. She sees a snowplough for the first time and remembers her schooldays in her hometown, shovelling snow by hand to clear a path together with her schoolmates. She notices the people living in her neighbourhood, who are mostly in their sixties, and ponder how the new homes they once purchased in their youth to start a family in have now become their retirement homes. She discovers unexpectedly that hanging her clothes out to dry on her balcony is not allowed in her apartment complex unless she installs a fence, something she ultimately decides against doing in order to fully enjoy her balcony view.
She feels accomplished after unclogging a sink and bathtub for the first time, a task she had never needed to do before, since she had often chosen studying over housework when she had lived with her parents. She decides to make a painting to hang on her wall, and because life is short, acts on that idea immediately by buying art materials and getting right to sketching and painting. She observes trees being pruned till bare and finds her worries about their wellbeing unfounded when they sprout new branches, concluding that they are simply getting a haircut and that it was about time for her to get one too.
She writes her days, and I read them, catching glimpses of her, of her life, her thoughts and memories, fifteen years later when she is no longer here. And even as the headlines bring about chatter and speculation about her life and the circumstances that led to her passing, here she is in the words on her blog, forever thirty.
What happens to our words after us?
This year, I had a surreal moment of sorts when I discovered fifteen-year-old me on the internet. It turned out that the Wayback Machine had preserved (albeit partially) the personal website I had created two decades ago, long before I had ever heard of the Internet Archive. I still remember doodling the domain name (that my sister helped me purchase) in the middle of my Biology textbook. Back then, I had thought that the name I had chosen sounded sophisticated, that it had star quality.
The layout has been stripped away, but I still remember the site in all its amateur web-design glory. The single-column layout with the green background. The domain title in a green scripty font. The banner cobbled from two photos of a girl blowing bubbles/a dandelion with annoying Getty Images watermarks I had to conceal or crop away, pictures that I had tried and failed to blend together and had settled instead with placing side by side, wrapped in a green border.
Now all I have left are the words, and yet the words alone are so telling. Fifteen-year-old me is ambitious at creating/at least dreaming up a host of pages/projects/sites yet is unable to see many things through, as the italicised Coming Soon’s peppered throughout suggest. Fifteen-year-old me is self-confessed crazed and unafraid to publish personal details in public, listing her profile like she were filling up a job application:
Name / NickNames / Age / Birthday / Location / Race / Religion / Occupation1 / Obsessions
Fifteen-year-old me is unhappy but trying hard to hide it, is a tomboy and klutzy, feels stuck in that awful middle of being better than average but never the best, especially loves bombastic words—I clearly did not understand the meaning of bombastic then—and has what I can only say as a very teenage taste in music and movies.
And finally, the realisation that gives me the most secondhand embarrassment (if you can call it that)—fifteen-year-old me is quite awful at writing. Though my language is error-free and technically decent, the writing feels choppy and desperately lacks poetic flow. Also, I had tried too hard to appear sophisticated. In short, I sounded my age—picture your typical teenager on Blogspot in the heyday of blogging, 2005.
Revisiting the words I wrote twenty years ago now as an almost stranger has been a strange experience indeed. To stumble upon a person I remember yet don’t quite remember, a person who feels all at once familiar and unfamiliar, a person that both was and is me—a fifteen-year-old stuck in time, immortalised by her words on the internet—
What happens to our words after us?
My three months2 into my new job have left me feeling flat and one-dimensional, like that background character in a drama scene who never exists beyond her job scope of waiting tables or ringing up purchases, her entire existence condensed to a title on a work contract. It feels strange—to be flattened and reduced to an underdeveloped character in someone else’s story when I inhabit and experience distinctly a whole other rich and textured world inside—and yet, the feeling is not unfamiliar.
On weekdays, I hurry across the road that leads home eager to leave behind “work me” and return to the “real me” only to discover with resignation that all I actually do is swap out work me for yet another version in a long line of me’s—the one that is a mum, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, you know what I mean.
And although I am surely all these versions of me, they feel constrained, moulded in some shape and form to fit into society’s expectations or if not to prevent any sort of unwanted conflict, more so the unproductive ones that I’m not hopeful will lead to any positive change. And it is for this reason that I can’t help but feel that I am only my truest and most authentic self when I write—unpolished and unfiltered, raw and real—a freedom afforded by the anonymity I revel in here.
This is where I can, for the things that I decide to share, not hold back and finally drop the “politically correct” and socially acceptable responses that I have on default. This is where my honest thoughts and words cannot affect the people I know, be it those I care not to hurt or those I can’t afford to offend. This is where I can capture the intensity of my thoughts and emotions without bruising an ego or stirring a conflict. And this is where perhaps my very personal and one-sided view of my life can be accepted and the core of what makes me me can be embraced.
You see, the irony is that maybe we can only be our truest selves with a stranger, and perhaps distance is not the line that divides us but the line that draws us together. Distance is the boundary that brings freedom and the separation that removes friction. Distance makes space for understanding. It creates room for acceptance.
Because you’re too far for friction. Because you’re not the one that I’m frustrated with and because my rough edges don’t rub you the wrong way. You don’t have to put up with the doom piles I scatter around the house or lack that item of clothing you want when I don’t keep up with the laundry. You’re not the one having your much-needed order and routine disrupted by my chaotic and absent-minded ways.
And so I’ve come to a closure of sorts in accepting that the audience for my words will never be personal. Still, I cannot deny a desire to be known fully, to long for my words to be read and for the person I that am to be embraced wholly by the ones that I love. It’s a thought that makes me wistful, realising that I cannot reveal what feels to be the truest version of me to my loved ones, accepting that I can only squirrel my words away here because I can never expect to be known fully by the ones I know.
Even then, I wonder if my desire might be a purely selfish one. After all, living in society calls for a level of self-regulation and being in community requires a degree of compromise—simply put, unless we are to be a hermit on a hill, we will need to put aside our individual needs and desires for the sake of others.
Consequently, there is then a comfort I derive from the connections I make here—through the act of writing and being read online and from reading the everyday words of others—a comfort of being seen for what feels to be the most genuine part of me, of being known for what is in my centre.
Though you do not know my name, you know some of the deepest thoughts in my heart. And though I have not seen your face, I see you, and I see in you—the echoes of me. In all honesty, we would likely never be friends even if we could ever cross paths—we are far too different—and yet our words resonate, and we find, like kindred spirits, that there is something that draws you to me and me to you. Worlds apart, our words travel, crossing countries and continents; they reverberate, across cultural, gender and generational lines.
And in this life both beautiful and tragic, we find in our words the lines that draw us together, the lines that join—
Me to you.