Love Letters from My Younger Self: The Blogspot Years
Rediscovering early 2000s blog writing through the lens of ADHD, memory, and millennial burnout.
In 2008, I was 21 and convinced that suffering was glamorous. If you weren’t romanticising melancholy, were you even alive? I believed in unrequited love, Blogspot anonymity, and that quoting Dalí could make my emotional collapse seem artistic.
And it kind of did.
I didn’t know it then, but what I was really doing was documenting early-onset millennial burnout, masked as poetic self-reflection. The internet was still soft around the edges, no filters, no “content,” just digital diaries and raw drafts of our inner monologues. I wrote with the urgency of someone trying to outrun time, and a subconscious belief that if I captured the feeling, it wouldn't swallow me whole.
Here’s the first entry I’m revisiting:
#1 All we ever wanted was everything:
Looking back, I see everything again.
But the second time is never the same. It’s always a retrospective, a return to a fixed point, like a train looping back to its departure station once the itinerary collapses under its own momentum.
In this new script, whose final contours I’ve just outlined, I’ve come to realise something simple, and almost devastating: My happiness depends on the version of myself that lives intensely inside someone who only exists through knowing me.
It sounds like projection, but it’s worse, it’s intimacy. An identity formed not in isolation, but in the mirror of another’s attention.
The pain, the tears, the quiet sobs that fall with reckless velocity, these are not weaknesses. They are, in fact, the purest expressions of something noble: sensitivity. A rare kind of clarity reserved for those still willing to feel without irony.
There is, even now, nothing more curative than a quiet, measured conversation, just enough warmth, just enough wit, to tip the balance and turn grey zones into something resembling light.
“There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”
— Salvador Dalí
And sometimes, if you listen closely, that satisfaction doesn’t come from the fireworks, but from the soft implosion of understanding yourself better the second time around.
Memory as a Diagnosis
Now, re-reading this with ADHD in the mix (diagnosed much later), I understand why the emotions felt so explosive. Why memory blurred into obsession. Why writing wasn’t a hobby, it was triage.
And honestly? I miss that girl a little. Not the anxiety or the drama or the codependent longing, but the way she felt everything as if it were the last page of the book. The way she found catharsis in a two-line paragraph. The way she never once second-guessed hitting publish on a blog post that read like a breakup letter to the void.
The Shape of Our First Language
Maybe sensitivity isn’t something to grow out of, it’s something to refine. Like an instrument you learn to tune, but never mute.
And maybe the past is less of a train station, and more of a signal, flickering in the distance, reminding you of the shape of your first language: feeling.