I wanted to write an end-of-year round-up of my favorite posts, press mentions, published articles, but in the middle of going through my archives, I stopped seeing the point. Everything is on this website, if you want to read it. (My most interesting pieces, I found, were usually written in response to reader questions.) Anyhow, instead of reveling in the awesomeness that was my year, I took a little trip back in time to a less happy period of my life. I revisited a piece I posted to SexAndTheIvy.com in July 2007. That New York summer, I wrote the following:

I’m incredibly scared of loss. And I know I shouldn’t feel like I lose something by sleeping with someone, but I do. I decided to stop having sex because I was sick of giving away all these pieces of myself and subsequently worrying about unintentional attachment, ill-advised yearning. It felt like I had no control.

When I reread this in March 2009, I said:

I feel so far away from this girl, and yet, I think I finally understand what people mean when they tell me that my blog entries make them wish that they could give me a hug … Now, when I read myself, I feel sad. I feel sad that I was so utterly broken that I was incapable of experiencing any sort of emotion toward men. I had made up my mind at this point that this blog meant more to me than social acceptance, that what I stood for was more important than the existence of a love life, and that there was no possibility of love in any case since no man would willingly sign up for this.

I used to drink to the point of blacking out three or four times a week as a freshman, because I was so depressed. So nothing that happened the year afterward seemed particularly distressing in comparison. My sophomore year of college was fairly disastrous as far as my love life was concerned. Seemingly against all odds, I passed my classes. At that point, I still vaguely cared about school, but I was already well on my way toward sleeping the days away in a haze of depression and/or inebriation. Until at some point, I found myself incapable of leaving my dorm room. But even then, I managed to rally. I took out-of-town trips on a bimonthly basis. That spring, I decided I wanted a clean slate and obtained a transfer to a different house for the following fall. I applied to as many New York City internships as possible and got two offers for the summer. I wanted badly to escape. Given that I was counting down the last days of the semester, I wasn’t what I’d describe as happy. But I yearned for the future, and when you’re used to hopelessness, yearning is a good sign.

New York was a lot of things for me. Emotional independence in the absence of my college confidantes. New friends and coworkers. A new kind of thinking, a living in the moment, a ceasing of worry and anxiety about the future. New drugs and games, same old fakery, but at that point, the glitter of the City hadn’t yet worn off. I never wanted it to end. I wasn’t necessarily what I’d describe as “happy”, but there was something freeing about the experience, because I later noted:

As closed off as I was, I was undeniably happy that summer and happy to go back to school and happy to be alone. I was finally free of seemingly endless heartbreaks and disappointments, because I had ceased to hope. And in a strange, satisfying way, I was incredibly at peace for the first time in a long time. In the back of my mind, I thought, ‘I’m going to be alone forever, and this suits me just fine.’

I dated an actor at the end of that summer for about a month. I slept next to him even though we were completely wrong for each other. I don’t know why I did it, because even then, I knew it didn’t work, that it was a waste of time, that it meant nothing. But maybe I needed to prove to myself that I could still go through the motions. I didn’t, in the end, learn to feel again, but he was the last person to see me when I left New York.

I never admitted this publicly, but I wanted badly to take a gap year then. My summer internship led to a full-time job offer, one I didn’t take because my mother was unwilling to consent. (Despite the fact that, as an adult, I didn’t really need her consent, this was before I told her about my blog and rebelled against her authority by pulling shit like flying out of the continent without her knowledge.) I got my house transfer, alright, and the perpetrator of my sophomore year heartbreak had graduated, but I was not at all excited about the prospect of returning to school. I had never been happy at Harvard; I didn’t see how junior year would be different. I begged my mother to reconsider. I’d have a salary (a salary higher than anything I’ve since been offered and twice as much as any first-year editorial gig). And I already knew New York. She said no. She didn’t want me to take five years to graduate. As it would turn out, I’d take that long anyway.

I don’t blame my mother. She’s not the reason my naked photos ended up on the Internet and not the reason people laughed at me and not the reason I failed school my junior spring. I did that all on my own, thankyouverymuch. But very occasionally, I do wonder how differently life would’ve turned out had I not come back to Harvard a year older and a tad more resentful, if I would’ve learned on my own in New York the independence and fearlessness that others assumed I’d already obtained.

In any case, no regrets.

At first, junior year really didn’t seem particularly special. I stopped pretending like I enjoyed the final club parties and recruiting events, but I was still hanging out with the same five people and still — as much as I loathe to admit it — sleeping with the same three completely off-limit dudes. There was astonishingly little progression in the arena of sex. But unlike sophomore year, something was different about me. I ceased to feel inadequate when I looked in the mirror. I spotted cracks in the arrogant facades of my classmates. I stopped waiting for boys to come around. I still dated. I still flirted. But there was this profound distrust, not because men were untrustworthy (though some of them certainly were), but because boys were unreliable. And most men were really just boys in grown-up clothes. That’s why, when I did meet Patrick, I didn’t write intimately about him:

I never did put much of my relationship with Patrick down into words. In retrospect, it was because he meant more to me than anyone ever had, and transcribing my feelings to text suggested a permanence I wasn’t ready for. It’d be admitting that he meant something to me, and even if he didn’t know it and my readers didn’t know it, I would certainly know it.

I met Patrick during what was probably the most emotionally tumultuous period of my life. I was so utterly terrified of loss, of losing Kennedy, of losing my family’s support (if they found out about this blog), of losing him, and honestly, of losing myself in him. I was so afraid of losing the ability to be alone and happy at the cusp of 20. And while I desperately wanted this to work out, I simply couldn’t envision a future with him. I couldn’t envision a future with anyone, because I had become so fully cynical in my views about love.

In my head, I still think of Patrick as that thing that changed everything, not because our relationship is my most significant, but because he offered an escape from this place that I hated, from this place that made me hate myself. But really, if you look at my junior year of college and everything that happened and the things that preceded it, I’m not sure that Patrick’s presence made much of a difference either way. I hadn’t gotten kicked out yet, but I was mentally checked out, so ready to leave Harvard, to be anywhere but Cambridge, to be anyone but a sex blogger who lived among people who looked down on her for stating what they were too well-bred to admit out loud. So maybe, if it hadn’t been Patrick, it would’ve been something else.

Sometimes, I think that I willed myself into getting out of there, but of course, that isn’t the truth either. Unlike the unhappy semesters before, junior spring was different because I was, for the first time, optimistic. And I remember thinking that I really ought to finish my papers and I remember that I really didn’t quite care. Perhaps because I could no longer fake it. As long as I believed in the allure of Harvard, then I’d have a reason to work toward my degree, but I was so fully disgusted with everything that had happened, so disappointed by how petty and cruel my classmates could be, that I literally could not muster up the simple desire to keep on going on. I got kicked out of school over a 20-page paper I was perfectly capable of writing. It’s easier to chalk it up to laziness, but I don’t think it could’ve been that. I had to deal with huge amounts of fall-out, not just from the administration, but from my parents. It’s what made me decide to tell them the truth about my blog. Was I really just not interested in writing that paper? Or was my desire to leave Harvard so strong that I opted for self-sabotage? How much of that did I choose? I still don’t know.

In any case, it was that gap year and not Patrick, not any feminist awakening, that saved my sanity. SexAndTheIvy.com ended for a lot of reasons, but the one I don’t often mention (and didn’t quite admit to until March 2009) is the following:

The unstated goal of blogging was always to figure out who I was and who I wanted to become. Now that I know … well, this blog will never be what it once was, because I’m not who I once was. To be honest, I hope I never feel compelled to write here again. It’s an artifact from a time when I was unsure about many things, most of all my worthiness of being loved.

Yet as significant as that year was, most of it went unrecorded. I said then that I didn’t want to turn Patrick into a character, that this version of him will seem like such a distant representation of who he later becomes. This is how I feel about most of the characters on my blog today. This is how I feel even about my closest friends, who I wrote about and whose desire for privacy ultimately contributed to my decision to stop blogging.

When I say “characters”, I do not mean that I purposely fictionalized anyone, but I do admit that it is extremely difficult for me today to differentiate between what I wrote and what I lived. In part, it’s because I don’t really remember a lot of early college. And it’s not because I was drunk for most of it (despite all the tongue-in-cheek references to drug/alcohol misuse).  The strange truth is that after I met Patrick, left school, and moved to Boston, I forgot a lot of what happened. Quite literally. I have worked on enough book proposals in the time since to realize that there are some serious gaps in my memory for which there are no explanations. I don’t recall significant experiences during which I was undoubtedly sober and for which the rest of my friends were present. Until I started rereading SexAndTheIvy.com for the purpose of completing this book proposal, I’d completely forgotten the fact that I flung a hard object (my Motorola RAZR, I believe) at my sophomore fall fling and punched my sophomore spring hook-up (albeit with his consent) after I found out he had a girlfriend. In the back of my head, I knew that these events had occurred. I must’ve, right? But if I never could’ve reconstructed them on my own, without the help of an online diary or an old friend’s hints, do they count as memories?

Maybe I partied too hard in college after all and now I’ve permanently compromised my ability to recall the past. I think the more likely explanation is repression. There were a lot of things at the time that I never wanted to forget, because I knew, even then, that these would become formative lessons in my life. So I wrote them down. I wanted to remember the heartbreaks, the never-ending unhappiness, my sexual coming-of-age. And I knew, despite what anyone said about me, despite my purported hurt at criticism and slurs, that there was nothing wrong with being genuine, even if my honesty came at the price of my pride. Still, once I broke free of Harvard, not only did I never look back, but I apparently made an unconscious effort to forget what life was like.

I never read SexAndTheIvy.com. Since I stopped the daily updates in 2008, the only time I browse backward is when I’m writing a book proposal or doing fact-checking. When I take the time to reread full entries, it makes me nostalgic, sometimes sad. Mostly, it makes me frightened, frightened that someone can simultaneously be so profoundly impacted by experiences of trauma and yet not even remember how they came to be who they are. The fact that I can’t remember without the help of an online chronicle bothers me more than the fact that I once felt hurt. The latter happens to everyone, doesn’t it? But the former … that only happens to those who aren’t quite at peace with the past, those who maybe still blame or hate themselves — even just a little bit — for what happened then, those who found that forgetting is easier than forgiving.