Xanga Poetry
Do you remember Xanga?
Or maybe you were one of those who preferred LiveJournal. The benefit of Xanga is that it’s now as dead as MySpace. You can’t even see your old posts unless you put on your Indiana Jones hat and download a .zip archive. All that just to read the teenage angst you once wrote.
But I did just that.
And I’ve been using it on Comatose.
Adapted to fit my current voice, and fixing things that were just obviously lazily written… but the core ideas of a lost soul struggling to fit in are still there.
In between the embarrassing bad teenage angst and unrequited love poems are time capsules of pure, raw, dedicated emotion. While I clearly struggled to express exactly what I wanted, and I could’ve used an editor or two, there’s a genuine pathos to a lot of it. In the years since, the cynicism that comes with getting older has created callous after callous on my soul.
It’s made me reflect on how I managed to be happier for a time, because I am in a bad place right now. Where I am in life, I feel depleted. Dejected. Lost.
Living abroad gives you a swift kick in the face on how important having a support network of some kind is. Most people don’t care if you’re struggling to make friends or figure out your visa situation, least of all the people at the immigration office.
It’s gotten so bad that these days I honestly struggle to get out of bed. I get scared when I see an email notification because I can’t imagine what I forgot to do and what impact it could have on my life.
But even in this rather bleak time, there’s hope. I’ve found a way to have a show and create something. I’m slowly figuring out how to crawl towards the life I want. I just hope I can figure it out before everything else passes me by.
That lost feeling resonates well with my high school self who didn’t even want to go to college.
It’s also left me wondering if Medium is still around in 10 years time, what will my future self think of what I wrote today?
Listen to this week’s episode, Mixing, Ambiguity, and Anxiety:
Written by John Bauer of Comatose.
Comatose is a weekly series of amusing anecdotes, insightful commentary, and pithy stories. Every week three contributors are featured in short segments. The segments, though often unrelated, are tied together using music and narration to set the scene. Relax and enjoy the ride while listening to topics as varied as love, birthdays, and reciprocity.
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