What are we, but remnants of our old digital identities?

Hello. Today’s post is a bit different, just a quick break from book reviews to share some thoughts that have been on my mind lately.

I don’t know if anyone was a tidy teenager who kept track of all digital accounts and e-mails they owned alongside the corresponding passwords. I certainly wasn’t, and I deeply regret it.

As a millennial, my digital life began with my first Hotmail account in 2004 when I was eleven years old. To be honest, I can’t even remember the e-mail itself, though I’m pretty sure it contained the word “princess” somewhere in it. What I do remember is that I created my first blog shortly afterward using Windows Live Spaces, where I’d write entries as if they were my diary, only that they were public and everyone could read them. Yes, very cringy. In parallel, I came across Matmice and created my website. I remember the platform was targeted at kids and teens and allowed the users to connect with other kids around the world. My page used to have a pastel pink background and a ton of glitter gifs and images from DollzMania.

My curiosity for creating and customizing websites led me to set up another site using FreeWebs (now called Webs). It consisted of tons of dolphin pictures since this happened during my short era of sea obsession, where I even asked my parents to paint my room aquamarine. Having a dolphin website was not enough, and around 2006 I created a Xanga account. I’d dare say it was my first “real” blog, where I began writing book and film reviews and mixed them with ramblings of my personal life. I named the blog “Decoding Scribbles” and that name stuck with me when I later used it for my first Blogger site in 2009. By then, Xanga was long outdated, and Google’s Blogger became the home for my ramblings during the remainder of my teen years until 2011.

At this point in my life, I had just begun college and thought that the blogging years were over. Fast forward to May 2012, in the middle of midterm exams, I took a studying break and ended up creating a new blog, also using Blogger. This time I named it “Lunaris Vita” and later changed it to “La Luna Vita”. It was a fun era of my life where I kept using Tumblr but also had a small space where I could write down my thoughts unafraid of sharing them. What began as a personal blog shortly transformed into a lifestyle one, with visitors (other fellow lifestyle bloggers) regularly engaging in the comments. That lasted until 2017.

Then came 2018. A new year had begun, and I was no longer blogging and thought it was pointless. But I still felt like something was missing. So in February, my bookstagram account was born. At first, it was titled “My Olivine” but later changed to “Olivine Books”. While the main point of having a bookstagram account is sharing posts on Instagram, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I felt unsatisfied and created a WordPress blog. But instead of starting from scratch, I imported a few blog posts from my “Lunaris Vita/La Luna Vita” era and incorporated them into this blog that you are reading now.

I am almost 30 now. I no longer use blogs as online diaries and am very well aware of what I share online for safety measures. And while most of the platforms I have mentioned have already closed down long ago, I’d do anything to obtain screens shots of what my old blogs and websites used to look like. Read what thoughts were so important that I felt compelled to share them. All the effort and self-taught Html codes for the sake of self-expression. I didn’t have the pressure of the number of likes or visits, and it felt so freeing.

But I’ve lost most of my old e-mails and passwords, therefore I can no longer access old blog accounts like the one I used for Blogger or Xanga. The other day out of curiosity, I googled an old alias of mine and came across a Flickr account I don’t even remember creating — but it was mine alright, all pictures had my name on them, a failed attempt at creating my own watermarks.

Which makes me wonder, what other creations of mine remain buried under the internet’s binary codes? What are we, but remnants of our old digital identities?

Advertisement