Greetings my lovelies,

Apparently, I decided my theological and emotional excavations weren’t quite enough for one week, so I went ahead and initiated a full-scale digital archaeological dig.

I went hunting for my lost stuff, my old archives, and my past blogs.

I have been online since 1995. That is over three decades of digital footprints, dating back to the dial-up screech, primitive chat rooms, personal homepages, and the very dawn of blogging itself. If you’ve lived online for that long, you know how the internet works: platforms sunset, web hosts quietly pull the plug, links rot, and entire eras of your life drift into the ether like abandoned satellites.

It started with a simple, innocent urge to do a little housekeeping—pulling old contact exports, cleaning up old records, and tracking down pieces of writing I poured my soul into years ago. But the moment you crack open the lid on those forgotten digital corners, the whiplash hits.

Suddenly you’re staring at old physical addresses for places you barely remember living, dead phone numbers with area codes that haven’t belonged to your life in a decade, and endless email accounts. Some of those inboxes belonged to past versions of me who were juggling completely different lives. But then came the phantom data—email addresses sitting right there in my personal files that were never mine to begin with. Strangers’ handles, tangled routing, and digital clutter from shared platforms that had to be purged one by one just to sweep out the ghosts squatting in my records.

And then came the real gut check: tracking down the old blogs.

If you’ve poured creative labor into the web, you know the feeling of typing in an old URL half-expecting a dusty, charming time capsule. Instead, you run headfirst into a brick wall. One domain brings up an error screen. Another has been quietly swallowed by a generic spam farm. And then there are the ones that make your blood simmer—the creative spaces you spent hundreds of hours building that were eventually hacked, sold off on you, or snatched up the second a registration lapsed, stripped of your voice and turned into a hollow billboard for strangers.

Seeing your past labor hijacked and sold off stings for a second, but if I’m being completely honest, web squatters, dead servers, and the Wayback Machine aren’t the only ones responsible for the massive black holes in my timeline.

I had a heavy hand in the destruction.

Looking back through the wreckage of those years, you can practically track my inner turmoil by the sheer volume of deleted accounts, abandoned URLs, and frantic reinventions. Every time life got too loud, too painful, or too confusing, my instinct was to burn the digital village to the ground, salt the earth, delete the entire account, pick a brand-new username, and start over with a fresh template.

I wasn’t just blogging; I was trying on identities like coats, hoping one of them would magically make me feel safe, settled, or enough.

And trust me, I heard and read plenty of people’s opinions about it over the years.

People loved to sit on the sidelines, calling me names, mocking my mental well-being, and judging every single move I made. If you’re reading this right now and thinking, “Was I one of them?” or “Yup, I did that to her,” then shame on you. Seriously.

That was the exact moment you should have put down your judgment and taken the time to see how I was honestly doing. That is when you should have stepped up. Instead, some of you convinced yourselves that when I was crashing or spiraling, the “best” thing to do was give me space while casually checking in from a safe distance.

Can I just say? That wasn’t the best thing you could have done for me.

How about actually reaching out and finding out how to truly be there?

I struggled a lot in the past. Yes, I sure as fuck did. But the difference between me and most people is that when I see someone spiraling, I don’t back away to spectate or gossip. I step in. I offer whatever I can to help pull them out of the ditch.

Big difference, people. A very big difference.

Now, sitting here at 56, digging through the archives to rescue whatever scraps survived thirty years of building, burning, and rebuilding, I ran headfirst into the reality of what I actually did—and what I survived.

Whole years are completely gone because I nuked the accounts from orbit. Entire seasons are missing because I was too exhausted from caregiving, working endless overtime, or navigating family crises to string three coherent sentences together. Other pieces were stolen by hackers or left to rot on dead servers. The Wayback Machine stops dead at a brick wall, the databases are empty, and the pages I swore I might find somewhere in the ether are just… gone.

At first, the archivist in me wanted to keep digging. I wanted to turn over every digital rock, check every dead-end aggregator, and demand the internet cough up my missing history. I wanted the complete record.

And then I stopped.

What the hell was I actually looking for?

A manual for a life I’ve already survived? Proof to show onlookers that I went through the fire?

As I sat there reading through the files and draft folders that actually did survive, the entire picture clicked into sharp focus. Those entries weren’t just chaotic scratch paper; they were a roadmap of hard-earned lessons that led me right to this chair:

• Surviving Is Not the Same as Choosing to Live: Reading back through those frantic words showed me just how long I lived small—shrinking myself to keep the peace, softening my edges so nobody else would be uncomfortable, and swallowing my voice out of fear of being “too much.” I was existing in constant survival mode rather than actively participating in my own life.
• Rest Is a Requirement, Not a Reward: I wore overwork like armor for decades, sacrificing health and sanity for machines and expectations that never cared back. Going through those pages reminded me that resting, breathing, and stepping away aren’t privileges you have to earn after a breakdown—they are fundamental rights.
• Walls Keep People Out; Boundaries Keep You In: For years, every time I was hurt, I stacked brick after brick around myself until I was completely isolated. Real protection didn’t come from hiding behind fortresses or burning down websites; it came from learning to say a clean “no” without an essay of excuses.
• The Dream Never Died, It Just Shifted: From the time I was a little girl wanting to be a journalist, I chased words because they held power, truth, and healing. I spent decades documenting everything around me, but reading the archives proved that the dream never vanished—it just evolved into writing and owning my own story.
• Honoring Rachel to Become Rae: Rachel was the version of me built for a life I no longer live. She was the crisis manager, the caretaker, the peacekeeper who held the world together on sheer adrenaline. I honor her for fighting through the dark and keeping me alive, but Rae is the one who gets to live, dream, create, and refuse to shrink.

A hijacked domain only owns an empty shell. A stranger can buy up an expired URL, and a hacker can scrape an old database, but they can’t buy the years I actually lived while writing those words. I don’t need a server to verify my scars, and I sure as hell don’t need validation from people who watched me burn and called it drama.

Those surviving posts carried me through the dark. They gave me a place to bleed, and they hauled me all the way to this desk.

Now, reading them with clear eyes, I see their real value. There are several pieces in those recovered archives that carry timeless weight and hard truths that still need to be spoken. I’ve been kicking around the thought of doing a 30 or 31 Days of Truth series—dusting off the rawest, most honest reflections from those decades and putting them right back out into the light on my own terms.

It’s an idea worth exploring. But the frantic digging? That is officially over.

Tools down. I am closing the tomb, sealing the door, and leaving the lost years, phantom records, hijacked domains, and the people who judged them exactly where they belong.

I don’t have an unbroken digital museum of my life since 1995, and I don’t need one. I’m not an exhibit; I’m a woman who has lived a loud, complicated, crooked, and deeply felt life. The pieces that survived are enough to remind me where I’ve been, and the blank spaces hold the rest.

I finally put down the matches, closed the archives, and pulled up a chair.

Present Rae doesn’t need to dig up the past anymore. She’s too busy writing what comes next.