The Public Draft of a Private Self

Seventeen years is a long time to spend in the comment box.

Long enough to watch entire platforms rise and collapse, long enough to see your obsessions cycle through new costumes, long enough to leave behind a trail of 5,316 comments, 139 posts, and 320 private messages across 421 different subreddits.

I decided to go down the rabbit hole and downloaded my entire 17 years of Reddit comments and posts to have AI do a kind of forensic analysis on them. Within minutes, it gave me what used to take weeks of rereading old journals: a panoramic view of how my writing, tone, and perspective have shifted since 2008. It was unsettling, humbling, and—if I’m honest—pretty funny.

In those early years, I was all-in on debate. Long comments, paragraphs stacked like courtroom arguments. I wasn’t just on Reddit; I was perpetually online, firing off Facebook statuses, arguing in comment sections, jumping into flame wars like they were sport. I’d write like the internet was a seminar room and I was determined to prove something—whether the topic was music, politics, or whatever controversy happened to be on the front page that day. One 2009 post runs over 5,000 words, essentially a manifesto dumped into a thread. I can see now how badly I needed people to take me seriously.

Looking back with the data in hand, I can also see the healing. The longest, most insistent comments cluster between 2008 and 2011, right before and just after my ADHD diagnosis. That was when I finally started therapy—therapy I never stopped. You can trace the shift in real numbers: in 2008, my average comment ran over 600 characters; by 2024, it was under 200. The compulsion to flood the screen slowly gave way to a more measured, more confident voice. That arc isn’t just about maturing online. It’s about learning how to live with my brain.

By the early 2010s, the fixation had shifted but the habit remained. The arguments were about Android phones, Google launches, YouTube trends—still mini-essays, still trying to set the record straight. My posts averaged 861 characters, often sprawling into rants that read less like casual forum chatter and more like op-eds written in haste.

Then comes the mid-2010s, when humor starts to creep in. Subreddits like cringe and videos show me experimenting with sharp one-liners, testing irony, letting go of the need to persuade. One throwaway comment just reads: “This is less cringe and more secondhand embarrassment wrapped in WiFi.” No attempt to argue, just a flash of dry wit.

At the same time, I’m writing in ADHD threads: “It took me years to realize that the way I work isn’t broken, it’s just wired differently. Medication helped, but so did finally naming it.” There’s vulnerability there, less performance.

And in the most recent years—2023 to 2025—you can see the arc settle. I still explain (I’ll probably always explain), but with restraint. Some comments are quick sardonic stabs—“YouTube comments are like archaeological layers: garbage on top of garbage, but if you dig far enough you find fossils.” Others stretch into a thousand words, but the energy is different. Not about winning, but about framing perspective. In one recent thread I wrote: “You don’t shed your obsessions, you just argue about them differently.” That might be the truest summary of the whole archive.

The strange gift of AI is that it makes this kind of archaeological dig possible. I didn’t have to sit with thousands of CSV rows by hand; the machine surfaced patterns, charted word counts, highlighted shifts in tone. It told me, without judgment, that my longest post topped 5,800 words, that my average comment length has dropped steadily for over a decade, that I’ve been circling around the same themes—music, tech, mental health—for almost twenty years.

But the machine can’t tell me what to make of it. That’s the work of reflection. And what I see is that growth isn’t always about radical reinvention. Sometimes it’s about watching your own voice age in slow motion. It’s about noticing when you’ve stopped trying to convert strangers and started writing just to share perspective. It’s about finding humor where you used to find outrage, and clarity where you used to find only compulsion. It’s about healing that shows up in smaller, sharper sentences.

And maybe this is bigger than me. Anyone who’s been online this long has a self-archive scattered across platforms—old blog posts, tweets, comments, photos, the messy drafts of who we were. Most people avoid them because they’re cringey. But they’re also irreplaceable. They’re the raw material of self-understanding in the digital age.

The climb of life isn’t a straight ascent. It’s jagged, looping, repetitive. You come back to the same obsessions again and again, but each time with a little more perspective. My Reddit archive is proof of that. It’s the uneven footholds of my own climb, and AI gave me the drone shot looking back down the mountain. What I saw wasn’t a polished story, but a messy record of becoming.

The moral, if there is one, is simple: own your voice. Look back at the drafts, even the ones that make you cringe. They’re proof you were climbing. And every once in a while, take the time to trace how far you’ve gone—not to rewrite the past, but to remind yourself that growth isn’t a single moment of arrival. It’s the slow evolution of tone, perspective, and the stubborn obsessions you carry with you all the way up.