After however many months of complete inactivity, I've finally caved and started using neocities for its intended purpose again. My job has brought me into much closer contact with "shitty" (barebones) websites than I have been before, and it might have actually been the tipping point for me to start caring enough about html to update this site. The idea of having an absolutely dogshit quality website compared to professional product is honestly kind of exciting to me, and I feel like it's one of the purest forms of using and interacting with the the internet. Like, how much closer to the soul of the internet do you get than having tiny file sizes and web design that could be displayed on a computer from 2003?
There's a lot about the 2000s that I know I should be glad to have avoided, but some parts of it are really nostalgic to me in a way that is accentuated by my missing out on them. I was thinking about it the other day, and I can't help but wonder if the popularity of microblogging-type things like this among trans people of my age are due at least in part to not getting to really experience them as a child. As always, When you didn't get to grow up living the life you wanted, it seems only natural that you would use your years of newfound freedom to give yourself the childhood you were robbed of. If I couldn't be a teenage girl on the internet when I was a kid, I may as well be a teenage girl on the internet now, roleplaying a period of time that may have never existed in this form. It's kind of comforting to think about.
To be honest, playing at blogger on neocities and editing html brings back memories of daycare in elementary school playing pokemon and kirby and hanging out with other girls (a weird notion to think about, that I was hanging out with girls as someone who did not yet know they were a girl). Those years carry with them a certain innocence and unabashed authenticity that the activity of writing out one's thoughts directly onto the internet evokes; I was not afraid of being weird then, and I am not afraid of doing this now. The reclaiming of my life as something for me has been a years-long struggle, and I've had to fight through a lot of mental walls that I've put up for my safety, but I feel like I'm closer to living as who I want to be every day. I have spent so many of my formative years telling myself to stop being so weird or stop taking up so much space or stop trying to convince yourself that you're a girl and it was fucking exhausting. I don't want to live like that anymore; I can be a guy for work or family or whoever needs that, but I can't lie to myself about who I am and what I want and need.
Hopefully, writing these entries out will be a productive way of getting me to think about useful concepts in a decent headspace while also honing my skills in building a shitty website. I like this so far.