This is probably going to be a rehash of ideas and words I have already written here about my reasons towards writing. I know for certain I’ve touched on the topic before but I don’t remember if I ever went into detail about the different reasons I write and post here despite knowing no one is really gonna read it. Let’s start off with why I started this blog in the first place.. which if I’m not mistaken is somewhere around late 2012 or early 2013. This was sometime just before I graduated high school and I was just coming off of and dealing with the aftermath of suffering with clinical depression and having to be hospitalized for my suicidal ideations. It was very clear to me that there was now and has been for a while a lot of pent up feelings I’ve been suppressing to keep going about my days like I normally would but the truth is I was scared and deeply and cripplingly lonely. These feelings were going to ruin me again if I didn’t do something about it. I needed a way of expressing these feelings and my friend group at the time didn’t quite allow for that. I was kind of split between being a part of two groups during this time and maybe because of that I wasn’t too close with either, but I spent time with the group of guys I started spending time with since the year before that I mainly stayed in to spend time with my best friend and the other group was the group of girls I knew since freshman year. They were mostly from my AP/Honors classes I was enrolled in before I learned I definitely could not handle the workload of AP classes. Anyway I didn’t have much of an outlet so I created this site as a sort of means to release those feelings out into something that was physical and existed somewhere outside of my head. I wrote posts about me, my anxiety, how my shortcomings with love or my understanding of social situations or relationships have caused me trouble in my life. The main thing was I didn’t feel normal. So much so I actually saw myself as less of a person or just not in the same species/group as everyone else. I was different and this was my way of explaining my thought processes just out loud but hopefully to whoever took the time to read it.

And when I first started writing, I definitely didn’t want it to be a big thing. I wasn’t gonna go promoting my blog to everyone I knew in school but these were feelings about serious topics and topics that were important to me and I finally got into words how it is I feel about all of it so I did post it a little bit on Facebook and shared that page to mainly my close friends and family. With that I actually got more than I asked for. Not only were people actually reading my angst-ridden and whiny posts about how I don’t understand love and the way people treat other people baffles me at times, but people were complimenting me on my writing. They asked me if it was okay to share my posts with their friends or in some cases with teachers they knew and I even started having people ask me for my opinion on certain topics. “Empathy vs Sympathy” was written because a family member wanted some help with their distinctions between empathizing and sympathizing with people and “Are We All Replaceable?” was written to help comfort a friend who was dead set on their belief that they were replaceable to all of their friends. This was probably the Golden Age of this site because it no longer became about me. These posts were helping people either to help understand what having a debilitating level of depression and anxiety every day felt like, and a better understanding of (or at least understanding of my views on) religion, anonymity, love, and more. It was around this time when my friend Emily (just for ease I’m using the undelivered letters name) told me she was inspired by my blog and my posts to create her very own blog where she vented and talked about her opinions on different subjects. I can’t tell you how happy this made me and still makes me feel just thinking about having an impact like that and inspiring someone to be more creative and at the time I definitely felt like she needed a means of expressing her feelings more so I was glad to help her find an outlet to do so.

The good feeling that came from inspiring someone to express their feelings and to talk about what’s bothering them is what got me to offer my closest friends to be given author’s permission on the site so they were free to post whatever they wanted to in case they needed a means of venting their feelings. I thought the offer was just going to be one of those “if you ever need me I’m here” talks that don’t get taken advantage of but fortunately people did take me up on it. First my best friend started writing and after seeing that others began to follow suit. I don’t know how much it helped them. Hopefully it helped them just as much as writing helped me back then. So this site became the peak of what I wanted it to be. Sure I had some unrealistic hopes that as I opened it up for others to submit their posts this could be used as a public journal where you could vent anything you wanted or just read other people’s opinions on different topics to get a new understanding of them. That never took off which is for the best because soon after this is when both this site and I shifted and changed pretty much to be what we are today. I was having problem’s with one of my closest friends and I was feeling pushed away and lied to throughout. I definitely had this irking feeling deep in me that was telling me things weren’t okay and were going to end/blow up soon. Like an idiot I kept just doing what I knew best and tried to ask upfront, I tried to be honest about my worries but it didn’t matter because I was just told what I wanted to hear, and every thing that proved it was a lie I was kind of gaslit to believe just didn’t exist or I was mistaken. I was very much in the wrong during this time so I would’ve done what was right if only I had known or was told anything but I was painfully oblivious and that’s one of my biggest regrets/feelings of guilt I hold towards still. This put me in a position where I had a lot of anxiety, feelings of worthlessness (because the person I cared about most just seemed so dismissive and I don’t know how much of our friendship was actually built on true feelings), and I had lost most of if not my entire support system around this time. That’s about all of that subject I really wanna delve into (I’ve already written like 15 other posts about that and this post is supposed to be about the site), just know that this signified a big change in how I felt about writing and how I wanted to use this site.

I needed to write now because if I didn’t talk about these ideas and anxieties that kept bouncing through my head at a dangerous speed I was going to fall apart or explode. I didn’t know at the time why things had happened the way they did. Writing these posts helped me gather my thoughts and figure out what the fuck happened and more importantly what I was going to do now that part of my life had come to a close. Since then I have tried to shift the posts and the reason for the site to be back to what it was, a place for people to read a different viewpoint/interpretation of life or at the very least a site for me to express my thoughts on something that wasn’t an event that happened just recently (which I kept doing to cope with the feelings of hurt that came with said event). This was a phase of this site that I still never got to fully get away from because maybe my coping methods were made much worse and and I don’t know if I grew out of that again. Only now am I starting to feel less and less that impulsive feeling to write about what I’m currently hurt by but it’ll always be there a little bit and like it did in this post sneak its way in even when I don’t want it to. I was going to write another Undelivered Letters to an old friend/old love but I realized I have nothing to say I haven’t already said to them and I don’t need that closure from it as much as I thought I did. Eventually I suppose you have to put your pen down and go out into the world to gather more stories. Otherwise you’re just going to be writing the same story over and over again. And even if this was my favorite book, I can’t endure having to reread and suffer through its ending once more. Now what I hope this site stays as is a collection of my past thoughts, past heartbreaks, past mistakes, and past growth and show others when I’m gone or unable to tell these stories any longer, how I was just a fucked up kid trying his hardest to find happiness and fight away all the other feelings. A kid who fell in love but more often than not at the wrong time or with the wrong person. Maybe I’ll keep writing here and there but hopefully future posts will serve to just benchmark important events and important changes in my life and how future me can learn and reflect from my experiences and even shortcomings from these situations. Most importantly it’s proof I existed, as there really isn’t much of that going around these days.

To future me (in case you forget again): Get your shit together, focus on making yourself happy and staying away from people and situations that suck that happiness out of you, but most importantly never forget any of these people or events that helped make you who you are. They are the reason you changed and they are why you are still here. Appreciate them and don’t let any of it go in vain.

-T.