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 By then, Xanga was long outdated, and Google’s Blogger became the home for my ramblings during the remainder of my teen years until 2011.