Ignorant and Naïve

I’m fortunate not to have all the details of my early adulthood chiseled into the immortal stone surface of the internet. Facebook materialized midway through my university career, and the majority of what was shared by me and my peers before and just after that were, much like our flip phones and the specifics of our MySpace Top 8s, lost to history. There’s still evidence of my early internet existence out there, though. I started writing for newspapers back in high school, and some of those publications have since been digitized. But I really hit my e-writing stride in 2009, when I booted up my blog, Exile Lifestyle. I’d dabbled with blog posts prior to that, mostly for clients. But the work I shared on EL was all about me and my thoughts and my life, and for better and for worse that served as the basis for much of what I made after. I say “for better and for worse” because, looking back at my early writings, I feel the same full-body cringe I experience when I stumble across a…