"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
For one reason or another, I wandered back to Xanga today and discovered that the site is under major construction. I couldn't even find a single trace of the morbid relic from my dark middle school years, and at a glance, it didn't seem like anyone else's teenage testaments existed anymore either. Or at least, there was no way for me to access them, anyways.
(Side note: I still can't believe I'm 23. Ten years ago on this day, I'd just barely become a teenager. Like, what.)
Is it weird that I feel vaguely sad about this? Not that I ever planned on returning to that weblog platform again, but somehow it used to feel permanent--as in, I could go back to that site decades later and laugh at how crazy-emo-stupid I used to be. I couldn't explain how pixels and computer script work to you to save my life, but that little digital corner of the Internet housed a piece of the person I once was, and it's not hard for me to see how it influenced who I am today.
After reading that last sentence, you're probably thinking, What the fuck Sophelia... that's some serious cheesin' right there. But a few things happened in April (especially one incident that left me dumbfounded at its sickening irony) that made me reflect on certain past incidents with a more objective eye. In particular, I started thinking about this blog's genesis. And really, it all started with Xanga. If I had never made that crazy-emo-stupid Xanga, I may never have started blogging. If I had never written those crazy-emo-stupid posts, The Anathema would never have left those witty comments and the seed would never have germinated, growing into the thorny nest of brambles that eventually swallowed my naivete whole.
I might have sounded incredibly bitter just now, but in reflecting these past few weeks, I'm really not. It has been five years since I turned 18 and graduated from high school. No denial here: I used to be bitter. But I wouldn't want anyone to hold me accountable for the crap I did when I was at age 18; I'd like to think we've all grown up into better people who'd probably roll our eyes at what little shits we used to be.
For a long time, I latched onto anger because it was the easiest emotion to deal with. One thing I've learned in the last five years is that anger hurts less than sorrow. Anger directs the negative energy away from you. Sorrow causes you to dwell within it. And with this knowledge, I traced back through everything that had happened with The Anathema, and I realized just how much I relied on anger to distract myself from sorrow, and just how blindly self-centered I'd been. Fifteen-year-old Sophelia thought she'd been soooooo obvious. Twenty-three-year-old Sophelia looks back and thinks, You must be DELUSIONAL if you think anyone else would read THAT much into every insignificant little thing you timidly tried to convey, you oblivious twat.
I mentioned The Anathema to a college friend last autumn, and they were a bit stupefied to hear that I hadn't completely trashed all of the memories from my head. Quite possibly, they were politely masking a tempered rendition of my reaction to Love in the Time of Cholera's obsessive Florentino Ariza. But the truth of the matter is that, as pathetic as it sounds, The Anathema will probably never leave me. Love or hate, The Anathema breathed life into my first words as a writer, as the entity named Sophelia Lee. The whole affair is so deeply ingrained in my history, it is impossible to ever extract this thread from my past without unraveling the entire fabric of who I am now.
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