The Most Miserable Woman on the Internet in the Year 2003

Hi. Do you remember the old old internet? Like, 2003? On dial-up modem? There was this blog that I would read all the time when I was around eight or nine years old. I don’t know how I found it, nor do I remember how I even navigated the internet in this era. But this blog was written by one woman and she was really, really mad. About everything, all the time. That was kind of her thing. It was a rant blog I guess, back even before the era when one’s popular personal blog had to conform to some standards of normality, I guess, or respectability. The things people said and did on the old web were so utterly out there by today’s standards.

I wish I could remember more of the content of her posts. Navigating only on the feelings the memory of this place evoke in me, the complaints were probably about everyday occurrences that I had yet to ever experience, a faraway life of driving in traffic and dealing with idiot bosses and living with roommates. The details were as alien to me at eight as any science fiction story. 

But I recall that she had a roommate because I do remember one specific post. She posed this story as something of an explanation as to why she was the way she was online, always pissed off and raging at something or someone or just the world in general. She explained a time in her life when she and her roommate were truly and utterly broke, barely eating and paying rent.

She explained that during this period she also had a dog, I’m envisioning a golden retriever, and this dog was just poorly trained. I don’t remember where or when or why she got the dog. I suppose she didn’t have much time in her life to train it, which I now know is like a full-on part-time job worth of time and effort. It was constantly destroying her stuff and wreaking havoc throughout the apartment. She and her roommate were miserable and broke and constantly at wit’s end with this dog. The situation had just become unsustainable. She couldn’t afford to keep living like this, and she couldn’t take care of this dog. So she explains that one day, at her lowest point, she decided to take the dog out to the street and just set it loose. Completely free. It took off, and she never saw it again.

My second-hand retelling the story strips it of much of the emotion I felt when I was reading it as a kid. She describes the guilt and the perpetual anger she feels towards herself over it. She hates herself, utterly and completely. And that’s why she’s so mad about everything all the time.

I’ve since reflected on this story as I grew up and sometimes felt that it didn’t seem quite true. She had other options with the dog besides just setting it free to fend for itself on the streets. There are organizations in practically every city that deal with stray and unwanted animals, not to mention animal control and the city pound that likely existed. Surely she could have known someone who knew someone who wanted a dog? Or perhaps a family member could have taken it? But we always make up these rationalizations about the problems in other people’s lives. The fact is that sometimes people just do things that are fucked up. Like it or not, animals most certainly do end up on the streets every day, with no owner to ever claim them.

I’m writing all this because sometimes when I get really mad, I think about her. Sometimes I’m mad about stupid shit online and sometimes I’m mad about real tangible things in my life and the world. Sometimes my anger is justified and sometimes it isn’t. Like so many people I’m afraid of my own rage. I’m not saying that this writer threw her pet out of her home out of anger - I just mean the memory of that story is forever tied up with my feelings of shame and anger towards myself. 

So this is all just a roundabout way of saying I don’t want to be mired in hate, and I don’t want to write out of anger. I don’t want to be the most miserable woman on the internet in the year 2003. I don’t want to be enraged or to rage-bait people into reading my work. I don’t want to do or say fucked up things, and I don’t want to write about them on the internet for everyone to know. 

I want to write, but I am afraid - afraid that I put too much of the wrong parts of myself into my work.

So I’m promising to myself - right now - that I’m going to write out of passion, about things that I enjoy and interest me. Thinking and talking about things seriously and critically doesn’t need to bend me towards an endless spiral of misery and negativity. I don’t need to let my distaste towards the things I’m writing about seep into me and poison me. Because there’s love in there too, of course, or else I wouldn’t be writing. I love everything I feel compelled to write about. Looking at the bigger picture? There is absolutely no point in getting really, really mad. 

So there you go. That’s my mission statement. Welcome to my blog, my website, my newsletter, whatever. Hope you don’t hate it.