Today I rediscovered the website of the first person I ever envied as a writer. But in order to tell you this story, I have to bring you back in time.
Back when everyone learned to code HTML so they could add their favourite Taylor Swift song to their Friendster profile. Back when nobody knew enough about internet safety to stop oversharing about their lives online. Back before Facebook and Twitter and before we let billionaires decide how we spend our time. Back when therapy wasn't a thing, so emotionally repressed teenagers turned to their blogs to let their hearts breathe.
She was my senior in high school, from one of those legacy families. Which is just a fancy way of saying all of her siblings attended the same school as we did. It was a pretty big deal by government school standards, because it meant that the upperclassmen gave you better treatment, which meant that the lowerclassmen thought that you deserved better treatment too. It was a lot of perks for doing nothing but being born second.
She was (is) beautiful. Not that it had anything to do with her writing. She was (is) beautiful in a way that seemed irrepressible by the flesh and blood that held her bones together. She was a walking spring breeze and a warm ray of sunlight rolled into one, with a sense of quick-witted humour and easy charm that seemed to surpass her years. It seemed unfair to me that she was (is) also the most talented person I have ever met.
This is where you need to understand blogging culture, although there isn't much to understand. For how much the internet has grown quicker and shorter over the years, admiration is a human trait that doesn't get lost to time. It was just a little harder back in the era of Blogspot.
Before it was called Blogger, and before Wordpress and Wix and Squarespace entered the picture, everyone had a little Blogspot of their own. You could key in your email to subscribe to their blog, and if my memory serves me, there was a little feed of blog updates that you could read in your dashboard. What matters the most to this story is that blogging was already a dying culture when I entered high school, but I still did it. And so did she.
It is a rare thing to be part of the final few people clinging onto a social phenomenon. I suspect it is something I will only experience once in my life. It is a melancholy that only comes when you are alone but not truly alone, and that’s what makes the shock of being noticed all the more earth-shattering.
It also means my memory of this moment is inherently self-centered, and I apologise in advance.
It was close to graduation season when she quoted me in her blog. I remember nothing else except that I had compared high school to a spiderweb that forcibly linked us all together, until we inevitably escaped and the webs ceased to connect us to each other. A real attempt at a highbrow metaphor in a really shitty piece of writing. I didn't truly believe it was any good until she acknowledged it.
The thing about receiving praise is that it always feels good, but it always feels better when it's coming from someone who does the same thing you do. But while my writing felt like a clumsy fumble to make sense of those awkward, hormonal years, her writing saw something in our shared existence that I couldn't. Her words plucked out the simmering, violent emotions of teenhood and painted beauty over the pain. While I spent my teenage years seeking to understand the world through other people's words, she bore her soul open and simply lived.
I’m sure there was (is) a real girl hidden beneath all those words, beneath the perfect outer shell of good grades and artistic talent and general popularity. A girl who felt as shapeless and awkward as I did in high school, more form than substance in those younger years, quietly offering the world words in exchange for understanding. Or maybe there wasn’t (isn’t), and some people are just born with a talent so vast that it swallows their entire world whole with the need to create. Not for the fame or the numbers, but for the simple pleasure of living life through artistic expression.
Even now, my admiration and envy sit hand in hand. Her writing pierces through my thinly veiled adult facade and I have to force my eyes to swallow the words even if they hurt. Our existence is no longer shared but I enjoy the way her experience has shaped hers. I still find myself thinking of her from time to time when I sit down to write. I don't think she ever thinks of me.
I think about how I bumped into her mother at the dry cleaners a few months ago. I have never envied (admired) a person so close to me, yet so far.
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I'm going to share the link to her writing with the hope that it inspires you the way it has inspired me. If she happens to see my work some day, I hope she knows how much I enjoy hers.