Still, there was a certain degree of effort I put into the emails, effort unavailable to me offline for brainweird reasons. Honestly, they probably meant for more people to read their innermost thoughts than I ever did, considering that my emails were for my and my correspondent’s eyes only. Plenty of historical figures did this with their actual diaries, writing them in order, it seems, to be read. I write to be read, and not by some non-entity named “Diary.” I know plenty of people who do it and say they dress for themselves, but I’ve never understood it. To write as I did and send it to no one would be the equivalent of putting on real pants for a Zoom meeting, to dress up for a day at home. About having a place to express my innermost still-externalizable thoughts. Really, I was just obsessed with being heard and taken seriously. I became a little obsessed with having these hidden, inner depths, being a secret Old Soul that no one understood. How silly, and even how coarse and rude (they, being neurotypical, would have phrased accusations of rudeness in a way that neatly elided similar accusations toward themselves) I was in person, when it was my mouth speaking instead of my hands. They’d comment on how (and I’m forgetting the specific adjectives they used) unserious and even immature I was in real life. In the moment, the differences were most significant because my correspondents noticed them. There’s a lot to be said about the differences in emailing-Sarah and irl-Sarah, especially back then, when I didn’t realize I was allowed to be my textual self in the “real world.” In another post, I’ll probably spend more time talking about this, about what it means for autistic writing, etc. Such was life for an agnostic of the fedora-wearing variety at a Catholic school. My clearest memories are the debates I’d conduct with friends over email, mostly around philosophy and religion. I wrote about what I was reading, about the musicals I was performing in at the time, about what I was listening to (complete with the requisite YouTube links). I spent middle school thinking about religion and agnosticism, about the nature and limits of friendship (which are especially relevant topics when you’ve had a life of chronic-friendlessness, or, worse, chronic, mocking, and (you say retroactively) ableist faux-friendship tinged with disdain. The ones I have seen since confirm my own memories of the time. I wish I could see the full archive of messages I sent between, say, 20. I had a small circle of friends with whom I emailed almost daily, as well as a wider circle of penpals (acquired on a now-defunct somehow-still-active and profoundly sketchy early-2000s-era website, on which I was lucky not to meet a forty-year-old man posing as a fellow tween) with whom I exchanged denser, less frequent messages. Really, it wasn’t just correspondence, it was journaling, but journaling-as-(semi)public-performance not unlike this blog. I owe my past success with inbox-clearing entirely to the fact that, until high school, email served the near-exclusive purpose of correspondence. I mean, at least I’m not someone with a thousand unread messages –– I think that to experience such a thing personally might actually kill me, and then who would clean out my inbox? Of course, now one inbox has turned to four –– five if you count the Stone of Madness editorial box –– and zero languishing messages has turned to ten, minimum, per inbox. Deleting messages was (and remains) a blissful feeling. There was a time in my early emailing years that I fetishized the clean inbox, and would sit down in front of my computer until every new message had been replied-to. As is true for most of us, my email inbox count has increased in direct proportion with my age and academic status.
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