When I first published this piece last year, I wasn’t sure anyone would read it, let alone care about my memories of growing up in a tiny trailer park in the conservative South, or about sneaking onto LiveJournal during study hall and late at night just to write my heart out.

To my surprise, some of you did.

Lately, I’ve found a little more confidence in my voice here, and I’ve realized that so much of what I’m writing is about nostalgia and the unexpected emotions that come with looking back at the internet I grew up with, the places that shaped me, and the person I was becoming. Revisiting this essay felt like a natural next step.

So I polished it up, added a few new memories, and decided it deserved another trip around the internet.

Originally published in August 2025 | Revised July 2026

As a teenager, I was keeping a deep, dark secret, one that would have made my already complicated teenage years even more miserable if anyone in my family had found out that I was secretly online.

Online, I was living my best life and making internet friends. I spent hours discovering a version of myself that wasn’t labeled a burden or a villain by the people raising me, and it felt really good to connect with people who were like me.

It was 1999 and I was a sophomore in high school. On this particular day, I was sitting in yearbook class designing layouts in PageMaker for our end-of-year publication. On this particular day, I skipped lunch to finish a spread when a friend rolled her chair over and casually asked me, “Hey, do you have a LiveJournal?”

That simple question changed my life. At the time, I had no idea, but looking back on it now, I can honestly say that LiveJournal became the gateway to my creative life. It was the first place where I felt free to express myself without a filter and where I discovered that writing was something I really enjoyed.

Just in case this is your first time here, let me give you a little backstory. Ya know, because some of the stuff I’m talking about doesnt seem that revolutionary, really, but for me it totally was.

I grew up in an incredibly conservative home. My grandmother raised me in our single-wide trailer in a ratty little trailer park in the South. She regularly searched my backpack under the assumption that she would find drugs or notes that implicated me as being a Satan worshiper, there wasnt a phone call that occured where she wasnt on the other house phone listening in to catch every word. She kept a close eye on just about everything I watched, read, and listened to. Her job, as she saw it, was to protect me from “the wrong influences.”

I do think she genuinely believed that the iron-fisted household she created would shape me into a respectable Southern Baptist girl and that her rules and restrictions would keep me out of trouble, I think she really hoped that I would quietly fall into line without questioning the big “why”, or worse questioning her authority.

Surprise: it didn’t.

Instead, it taught me how to disappear inside my own home. I learned early that it was safer not to have friends, to not to speak up, to always be working on homework and to always have an extra credit project on hand.

I learned how to tell whether she had a bad day before she ever said a word. I knew that asking to go to the movies or the mall would end with me being grounded before I’d even finished the sentence. By the time I entered high school, survival mode had become second nature.

Outside our screen door, though, there was hope for me. School was a safe haven and the internet was still young and seemed like it was broadcast in full technicolor. I soaked up every vivid hue I could find, in secret, of course, because at home everything felt black and white.

So, back to when I created my LiveJournal account during lunch while the yearbook spread for the chess club flickered in the background, I remember feeling a cool sweat gather at the back of my neck. I knew that if my grandmother ever found out, I’d probably lose what little freedom I had. (And if you’re wondering... yes. She eventually found it. But that’s a story for another day.)

The moment I clicked “Publish,” something shifted in me, I was officially a rebel and for the first time in my life, I had found a place that belonged to just me. LiveJournal didn’t just give me somewhere to write, it gave me proof that people like me existed. Kids who loved movies they weren’t supposed to watch and bands their parents didn’t understand and artsy teens who made things simply because they wanted to and who weren’t yet tainted by the monetization of everything. Growing up, my family had me believing I was the strange one, but ya know what, blogging dismantled that belief. Every new journal or community post I discovered made the world feel a little bigger.

As I got older and slowly created distance between myself and the life I’d grown up in, but I always found my way back to blogging. LiveJournal became Tumblr. Tumblr became Blogger. For a moment in time, I hosted my own website but, then life happened, work happened, responsibilities happened.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped documenting my little life and started sitting on the couch doomscrolling for hours, consuming carefully curated highlight reels of everyone else’s lives, served up to me via platforms that rewarded performance over authenticity. I didn’t know it then, but it was making me feel utterly depressed. The comparison game was hitting hard and I was just following along because it was the trend.

Lately, though, something came back to me. Maybe it’s the second development of the frontal lobe (I think this happens in our 40s, much like it does in our mid-twenties) but the short form view of the world I was catching from that little screen in my hand was kind of reminding me of the trailer park views I had as a kid. I definitely do not want to become an influencer, and I really don’t have some grand message for the world. But I miss the internet before everything became content. So I came back. I dusted off the idea of blogging again and eventually found this space, Substack.

I missed personal blogs, I missed browsing their blog’s sidebar (remember those!?). Substack kind of had that vibe, it definitely had the long form, storytelling element that I loved about Y2K blogging. Nothing shared back them was exceptionally profound and there certainly werent posts about posting strategies or how to optimize this or that. Substack has a little bit of that coaching influencer cringe but overall, I have to say, it kind of feels like home.

The older I get, the more I find myself returning to the things that first made me feel alive. It’s kind of a trend to go analog now, but thats really what it is…Watching movies on DVDs, writing long blog posts that will never go viral but might make one person feel a little less alone, journaling with a pen on paper, making ugly art in a sketchbook.

And yes, I realize there’s a certain irony in writing about living more analog on a digital platform, but I think that’s okay. Maybe Yesterthings Press isn’t about escaping the internet totally but more about reclaiming the parts of it that helped us all become ourselves in the first place.

I’m trying to build a slower, stranger internet like the one we had growing up. I think creative curiosity matters more than the algorithm and that those old blogs made us connect and find real friendships.

I just want a space where we get to live in color again, before everything became content.

And honestly? I was just kind of sick of the whole parade, ya know? My DVD player rebellion wasn’t even meant to be nostalgic at the time. It was just me wanting to make my own choices again. But here we are.

It all started when I scrolled through every app on our TV and realized we rarely watched any of them. Instead, we spent more time trying to decide what to watch than actually watching anything. That realization sent me down a rabbit hole of physical media, where I discovered something hiding in plain sight this entire time.

Maybe I wasn’t plugged into the Matrix yet. Or maybe I had noticed them all along but had simply accepted that physical media wasn’t part of the world anymore.

Either way, something shook loose and I reverted to a previous operating system and I started catching up on decades of movies I never had the chance to experience in my youth. Somehow, this $40 DVD player became my tiny act of rebellion against a world that was always trying to tell me what came next and gave me a safe space to let the kid in me heal a little.

Now every trip to the thrift store and used book store feels like a scavenger hunt; I never know what’s waiting on the shelf between a stack of workout tapes and ten copies of You’ve Got Mail. Sometimes its a copy of the movie Stay and sometimes its The Craft or all of the Twilight movies.

You see, I grew up in a home where everything I watched, listened to, or read was carefully filtered. Entire corners of pop culture simply didn’t exist in my world. While my (at school-only) friends were quoting movies, discovering bands, and obsessing over television shows, I was living inside a very small definition of what was considered “acceptable.”

As a kid, I didn’t question it much. Well, no, I did, but questioning it wasn’t really an option.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized there were entire pieces of my adolescence that never got the chance to happen. So when I tell you that I squealed after finding a copy of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, I don’t just mean I found a movie. I mean I found another tiny piece of a life I wasn’t allowed to experience.

Watching these movies now feels strangely emotional. It’s like introducing my younger self to all the people, stories, and ideas she should have met decades ago. While that definitely sounds dramatic, it does genuinely feel like healing in a way that’s difficult to explain. Maybe that’s why I’ve become so fascinated with physical media lately?

A DVD isn’t trying to convince me to watch something else after the credits roll. There’s no algorithm deciding what I should consume next. It’s just me, a movie I intentionally searched for, found, and brought home. Its ninety uninterrupted minutes with that teenage girl who still lives somewhere inside me.

Recently, I ordered My So-Called Life from ThriftBooks because it was another cultural touchstone that somehow passed me by. I mean, obviously.

There was no universe where I was going to be allowed to watch Angela Chase kiss a boy, have a gay best friend, or dye her hair. Just asking to watch the show would’ve gotten me grounded.

I’m currently five episodes into my very first watch at forty-three trips around the sun, and I’m honestly devastated there’s only one season.

Where is the fan fiction? I need archived message boards and late-night Reddit debates. I need to know what Winnie Holzman imagined for Angela and the rest of these characters. More than anything, I wish I’d gotten to discover it when everyone else did, back when I was young enough to relate to Angela instead today, relating to her Mom Patty.

But I keep telling myself (and the younger version of me) that there isn’t an expiration date on becoming the person you were always meant to be. There isn’t an age limit on discovering the books, movies, music, and art for the first time, even if it shaped everyone else twenty years ago. I feel like I am reclaiming my younger self here but in reality this isn’t about recreating my childhood at all. It’s about finally giving myself the permission to be, to exist, to like the weird stuff I like and not worry that its going to upset someone else or get me grounded.

I know my childhood wasn’t perfect, but now that I’m older and have a little perspective, I think there’s something worth reclaiming from a time when we chose our entertainment instead of letting it choose us. I don’t want to the past, but I do enjoy finally getting to meet the parts of it I missed the first time around.

Now, before I dive into this love letter to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, I think that you may need some context on who you’re dealing with. In this time travel post, remember it’s 2004, I am 22 years old and have only existed outside the shackles of my ultra conservative, aggressively religious, prison-level lockdown strict, ‘because I said so’ childhood home for about three years. Everything is new, everything is magical.

Clem and Sam showed me the path to weirdness, then came Kat (Julia Stiles) from 10 Things I Hate About You. Kat showed me that you can also take no shit, which was a concept that escaped me. Saying ‘no’ or ‘talking back’ when something didn’t sit right was never an option in my home, so consider the elation that washed over me when I rented 10 Things, probably from Blockbuster if they were still around, and saw a gal who was in complete control of her destiny. She knew what she wanted, and she didn’t waver.

Then came Ramona. Now I have to admit, it’s been since 2010 that I saw Scott Pilgrim vs the World, so my Ramona memories are not as crisp as those from my formative tangle with freedom. Upon a quick search, it’s confirmed that she is an MPDG (Manic Pixie Dream Girl), but that there is a sprinkle of more to her. While I don’t remember the movie very well, I do recall Ramona and thinking, ‘ Yeah, I dig her vibe and her style. ‘ I think that — as shallow as it is — her style was exactly what I connected with, or maybe wanted to connect with, since I personally didn’t really dress like Ramona, but I wanted to.

The point I’m making with this post is that, while these characters were indeed created to help propel the storyline of a male character, for a little 20-something girl from a dysfunctional home and childhood, I really connected with the concept of possibility through them.

These characters were bold, unique and different. They were ‘quirky’ and had cool hair and/or cool clothes, and mainly carried a vibe that was ungovernable, which was something my little pre-fully-developed frontal lobe was starving for. They showed me that the type of gal I wanted to be was out there, sort of… I didn’t know what being a feminist officially meant, yet, so give me a break on that piece of it all. Still, I knew I identified with these characters on an aesthetic and, to some extent, a behavioral level.

The constant book reading or sketchbooking, the funky attire and hair, the brooding and sometimes moody disposition. I found myself in an awkward place, trying to figure out who I was in a time when I was newly on my own and had never been allowed to be anything other than what my family deemed acceptable. For me, the MPDG was truly a dream, until it wasn’t; then it became a possibility.

So, for that alone, let’s give the MPDG a little bit of a break, granted that I don’t love the fact that the sole purpose is for a male character. Still, if you can remove that from the MPDG archetype and just look at the few dimensions of her that we do get, she is actually a pretty cool gal who would be a great friend and a blast to thrift with. She would tell you that you have food in your teeth, she’d let you borrow her favorite boots, and she’d introduce you to some great books and records.

So, let’s let her be that version, and that version alone.

Thanks for time-traveling with me in this one.

— R