I had a livejournal from the age of about 11 until 18. That's right, all of my fifth grade angst through my high school experience, livejournaled. I stopped using it around 18 (because social media was the big thing now) and kind of forgot about it.

Ten years later, I'm 28 years old, and I see a post on reddit about livejournal. I'm like, "Hey! I had one of those!" and I decided to go back and see if I could find it. Dug through my old e-mail account, did a password reset, got my URL and username and password, and then I went to go check it out. I thought, hey, what was I doing when I was younger?

Oh. Oh no. Oh god. It was horrifying. It turns out, all of those feelings and memories were buried in the past for good reason. I looked at a few of the most recent entries, started to freak out, switched to a random page and found memories from middle school that I didn't need to remember, and that's when I started purging the everloving hell out of that account. Livejournal makes you do it manually, too, so... page by page, entry by entry. I had to avert my eyes while I deleted every single thing.

I'm so thankful that it was never archived anywhere, I think. I can't pull up any of the entries anymore. It's gone. Wayback machine never archived it. I'm in the clear. I hope.