Hello, it is me, and I am back. Back again. It's now (almost) the summer of 2024 and I have returned, just like we all expected. Five years in a row, can you believe it?
I am a sad little girl behind a sad little computer in a dark little room on the top floor of an apartment building somewhere in the United States. I have not much to offer to anyone. I was originally going to write much more in this message, but over the past few weeks I've slowly began to realize that I am really only shouting into the void.
I can explain all of the different ways I believe I've changed. I can mention that I spent four months without checking the site even once. I can say that I have moved on, whatever that even means at this point, and I can follow my original plan, which was to give a more detached and critical analysis of everything that happened in my past on this site. All of these things may help me in particular. They could give me a reason to have some sort of closure with the site. Maybe leave for good this time, despite the painful fact that we all know; When Redstripe says she will leave, it is not true.
The obvious truth is that this will not do anything for anyone but me. The site has not changed. I've just been absent from it. Back at the end of april I started to write a couple things in this document, mostly just fantasizing about proud reviews I'd get from people who had reviewed my old Confession story, recognizing whatever change had happened in the ten, now eleven months since it was posted. But those people are the last people who want to see something like this, and the ones that may care enough to even click on it are not going to be considering any kind of positive affirmation that they recognize my "change". My ignorance genuinely astonishes me, and it is an almost interesting and certainly thought-provoking kind of shame I feel, looking back on things from only the previous month- hell, the previous week sometimes, and realizing again and again that I've made one of the worst possible choices in a given situation. And look at me now! In a month I'll hate this! I'll probably delete it and turn my account inactive, the same old thing from last year. And then I'll look back on my decision to do that in July and come back for another laugh, which I'll regret in August. I'm even doing this as I speak. I'm creating something that could too easily turn into an endless self-reflective rant where I infinitely criticize myself, turning against statements I only just thought of mere seconds earlier, until finally I get bored and post a mess the likes of which would only amount to a slightly worse version of Confession.
It's best to wrap something like this up before it really begins. As I stated, posting this will get me nowhere because there is no one left who will think of me differently because of it. Fanfiction is a resilient site that will never truly die. It will always run like usual, and while the people may come and go, the roles they play will not. "Different face but the words never change." Trolls will always stick to their usual routine, which obviously does vary a bit with the troll, but it can always be broken down to a couple things that all the fanfiction trolls have in common. And then the story writers will always be story writers. It took some people a little while to figure out whether I was a troll or a story writer, because of, to put it simply, how often I changed my mind and how convincing I was when I did. And I did, in fact, want to be a story writer. I wrote stories, after all. But when you dig yourself as deep as I did with Confession, there is no escape from the negativity you've created. I had established myself as a troll, and I became boringly predictable. I tried and tried to change this, but just like right now, there were no more ears around to listen. All I was left with was my adolescent emotional issues and a place to thrash and flounder in hopes of feeding my addiction to a sufficient point with the next slanderous message. It became a chore to troll, and that was when I just faded out naturally, something that hadn't yet happened, but I was glad it was happening.
And now I'm here again. Going back to an old addiction and starting to feed it again. Except this time I am thinking it will be different, because trolling is still a chore. I've kind of lost sight of the line between posting something stupid and trolling, anyway. For now I won't be making alts, sending out copypasta reviews jam-packed with slurs, or any of that, but I can't promise that will be the case forever. What's different this year is that I don't really care anymore, and that is because I can anticipate what will happen if I do a specific thing. It's like playing a game for the hundredth time, a short game that never changes and can only be played in one mode. You have options, but they're not exciting to choose from because you've seen all the results so many times and none of them are gratifying. In other words, I'm feeding a dopamine addiction but getting much less dopamine out of it than I normally would. And who knows, maybe that's a good thing. I've abandoned most other social media and started doing a lot more personal projects in the real world. I might be on a good path here. But that's not what I care about when it comes to this site. I'm back to do what I feel like doing on a given day. That might be nothing. That might be a lot of things. But I'm not going to try and change it anymore. I'm going to visit this site when I think I should, and then I'm going to do other things when I think I shouldn't.
That's all.
- Julianna
(would prefer if the 'Redstripe' name just died, because I have not used it anywhere on the internet besides here for ages)