Saturday, December 29, 2001  12:08 am  <|>
<122> Perhaps fame has faded: So 2001 is almost over. Was it really a year ago that I started putting this site together? I was looking for a way to break out of the life I'd made for myself online. The name I was known by was Meg, but the person people thought they knew wasn't really there anymore. I had grown up right under the internet's eyes and this should have been hard enough on a young girl. But this is how I grew up and I am not sorry that's how things went. I'll always look back on it fondly, if you can call it that, and wonder where all that time went. I was a lot different then, or rather, I am much more different now. It's called getting older, growing up and now that I have I look at what I once created... this epic site called Meg's Place - and I think, what was I thinking?!?! Haha, well it was certainly an interesting time back then, when I was all innocent and unknowning of what was to come someday. I've come so far that I'm not sure how to go back anymore or what to do with what I once created.... it is this site which gave me my "fame" online. There was a time when I couldn't sign on for 2 minutes without being bombarded with IMs from my loyal viewers... couldn't go a day without a hundred or more pieces of mail from people telling me how much they loved my website. Yes, it was quite a time and I'll never forget it. But because I later became preoccupied, with growing up and moving on, while the site remained as I left it, with plenty of new young kids still coming to find a somewhat timeless site still appealing when I no longer did. This is when the trouble started, this is when I severed what was always the most important tie between me and my personal website... the personal part disappeared. It was no longer making a site that I enjoyed or reflected myself as much as it was keeping a memory alive in honor of what it once had been. Maybe this was the right thing to do... or maybe I should have let it die like most of the other sites that shined in the same day that I did. But I couldn't decide and because I had the ability to keep it going without too much effort and I still had the people behind me who begged for it to remain, so it did. And I keep saying I will revise my former site, pick up where I left off and improve upon it, but how can I when my personal site no longer reflects the person behind it? That is what THIS site has become. Digital Reflex was formed out of my pure selfish need to be able to express myself the way I wanted to, the way I ALWAYS had on the internet since I was 13 years old, it's just now this expression was a little more uncensored because I, as a person, have become a little more uncensored, and because of all this I am all the more free to say what I want, show what I want, and let a new website take the place of the old and reflect me for at least part of who I am instead of who I once was while I was growing up. That is how this website survives and naturally why it is updated more often and seems to be cared about so much more. It's not that I don't care about Meg's Place, it's just that I can't put myself into it like I once could when it was the only place I had to focus this "creative energy" on. So now, maybe what once gave me "fame" online now brings me down in the end, because it's become bigger then me without me behind it and something so empty only has so much time before it caves in...

So now what do I do? How do I make the right decision when I don't really think there is one? Is it better to let Meg's Place remain as a shell of what it once was? By doing that I still allow it to live, to be accessed by thousands of new minds, ones who would have been there at it's peak had then been born a little earlier. I give those who still believe in it the ability to go there whenever they want and I leave myself the option to expand on it someday when I finally feel that I can. I said I would get to winter break, have lots of time, and finally update it... and that remained my intention coming into winter break, it really did, but my lack of motivation and the fact that I forgot to burn the files for it before I packed up and came home to the room from which it started with only my laptop with me. I think I've realized that that era is over, my time as a breakthrough website owner - as I was being the "First Teen Domain" as everyone likes to remind me - has ended and maybe that is really a relief even though it haunts me. Maybe it is that which allows me to be quite content, to actually favor a quieter, more anonyomous life, online now. For I've covered the newspaper write ups, the magazine articles, and the awards. I've repied to the fan mail, answered the IMs, and even survived being reconized randomly out in the real world. I was a regular little celebrity and now I retire before I exit my teen years completely, as maybe it should be. And maybe the best part now about it all is that few that know me in the real world even know these things exist or once did, at least few know the extent of it all and to what great "fortune" it brought me. I like it that way and wouldn't have it any other. So now that I enter yet another new year, I wonder where I will be another year from now, as I can still remember how I was just one year ago. I had quite a transition this time last year, and now where I am is a new beginning, one I am so greatful to be at finally, because my world now, though still unsteady at times, it rather balanced... and I wouldn't have it any other way.