Compartmentalisation complete.
I have friendslocked all my entries, every single one of them. It was a long, tedious process, to avoid finding myself in Fish's predicament when I start being a Moot Parliament Programme mentor. Even though it is unlikely, I suppose there is no harm in keeping your embarrassing youthful excesses private, or at least limited to a circle of friends, who mostly don't hang around LJ any more. Though it is quite unlikely that my mentees will attempt to find out out that much more about me, since it's not a behaviour normally associated with teenage boys (I am assuming they will not do cross-gender mentor-mentee pairings), I'm not taking the risk. Questions about probability and magnitude of actual embarrassment versus the time cost of manually locking all entries have been settled so I shan't go too far on that.
(Just to have a feel of who's still around here, drop a comment if you see this!)
But in the process of reading all my past entries, I've gained a better understanding and perspective of myself, who I had been, who I had become and who I eventually want to be. Even though it's a terribly compressed understanding of 6 years of my life (and increasingly so as I returned to paper and pen), it's still valuable. It's always said that whoever doesn't learn from history is bound to repeat mistakes. I always understood that sentence to mean learning from the mistakes of others that lived in similar circumstances as yours, but now I understand it to include learning from your own youthful follies. Perhaps I judge myself harshly, because I actually enjoyed reading my old writings and had some good laughs, and while there were cringe-worthy moments, they were increasingly few and far between. At first I had wanted to delete my entire account, but after some reading I realised that there was no need to distinguish myself from my past by obliterating it. (And besides, what if I wanted to comment on friends' entries? No point trying to cook up a new LJ persona, too troublesome.)
I believe in the Chinese saying 旁观者清. As I grew to become a drastically different person, somehow I could understand (or rationalise) better what I had done and how I thought when I was still clothed in khaki and beige. And now that I have a broader perspective, I've learnt to discard my old "1 year good 1 year bad" theory, because every year is really a mixed bag of tricks and treats and some years just look like there was more of either. I think now I have learnt to take my failures in stride - I have become less likely to be mired in my own post-defeat thinking for extended periods of time, looking forward to tackle the next challenge that lies ahead of me. (I think.) Looking back makes you realise that you've come some way.
This might well be my last post. I've already cultivated a habit of writing regularly in a diary that nobody else reads. Perhaps it's not so good for developing one's writing or thinking without having friends to comment, but I suppose not many people care to know what I think or how I feel. Perhaps one day I will give my diaries to my wife, children or grandchildren (wait long long), and I will also give them a copy of all my LJ entries, and say to them, I think you deserve to know about me in some other way, since I cannot possibly detail my entire life to you. Not to say that personal interaction is insufficient to understand a person, but I think all my writings are significant enough that I would want my future loved ones to read them, and laugh/cry/angst/exclaim with my teenage self.
It has been an interesting 6 years, LJ. I'm glad I've been here for as long as I did.