I found an archive of old posts and Gmail chats from when I was 11 — and instead of cringing, it endeared me to that youthful, carefree version of myself

• I recently found a forgotten archive of Gmail chats and Google Buzz posts from when I was 10 to 11 years old.
• Reading the posts was a bit surreal, and reminded me how silly and effusive I was as a kid. 
• It feels harder to be expressive as an adult and on the irreverent internet today — but I'm inspired to try.

I started becoming a conscious person as the world was moving online — meaning, during the boom of social media platforms in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was simultaneously gaining awareness, learning to socialize with others, and growing up as a kid.

While people only a few years older talked to their friends on the phone or sent physical letters, I mostly connected to my friends online.

I remember being so fascinated by the internet that I once asked my parents to take away my laptop and video games for a week when I was nine because I was concerned I was getting addicted. Doing that today feels practically impossible.

What I loved most of all was adding my friends on Gmail and talking to them using the chat function, Google Chat, or Gchat, an almost-forgotten relic that few people use anymore. Instead of joining Facebook (my parents didn't let me) or X (I had no idea what that was at the time), I used Google Buzz as my sole social media platform. Buzz was short-lived — it was launched in February 2010 and discontinued in December 2011 — but it played a key role in getting and making me very online. It was my springboard into social media.

Over the last decade, I pretty much forgot about Gchats and Buzz.

Then, the other day, I randomly found a folder on my Google Drive named "Buzz." Inside, there was a large PDF file titled "Buzz-0001," with 42 pages of all the Buzz posts I ever published dating from February 10, 2010, to December 10, 2011 (or the entire lifespan of Buzz). It felt like finding a time capsule in the attic: a frozen snapshot of my daily experiences and musings as an 11-year-old boy figuring out the world in the early 2010s.

Reading the posts, I was startled to find such joyful innocence and unfiltered emotion in myself at that age. There are numerous videos and forums online about people finding their old MySpace accounts and Facebook posts and saying they feel "cringed out," or embarrassed. For me, however, I wasn't scared to re-meet my younger self. I was endeared by him.

The discovery and reflection prompted me to dive back into my hundreds of old Google chats, which were all saved in my account. I loved going through the archive; it made me yearn to be a kid again — when I was effusive as hell without caring about how overdramatic or cringeworthy I sounded.

I divulged my silliest thoughts on Gchats and Google Buzz

I'm so online now it's excruciating. My brain is crammed with a never-ending list of nonsense phrases, from "Skibidi toilet" to "girl math." Looking back at these chats was surreal. In one of my first chats to a friend who lived in my old apartment building, circa October 2009, he said he was going to "brb," and I asked what that meant. My brain was so clean and unpolluted.

In another chat from December 2009, my friend asked me if I had a Club Penguin account, and we arranged what server to meet on. After playing for three hours, we agreed to meet up on the same server at 8 a.m. the next morning. No amount of Club Penguin could be too much. I enthusiastically wrote messages with a dozen exclamation points and sometimes repeated words for dramatic emphases, like when I told him I got a new Pokémon card that had 140 hit points (which is a lot, for those not steeped in Pokémon culture) and could wield powerful attacks.

"IT KNOWS THREE ATTACKS!" I wrote excitedly. "IT IS AWESOME."

"OMG :O," he wrote back. "OMG OMG OMG :O :O :O :O."

Back then, there were few rules on how to communicate online beyond being wary of strangers (or what most parents warned as "stranger danger"). There was even less etiquette and slang. This was before people started to use "lol" as a nervous filler word and adopted ironic tones online.

We conveyed our raw emotions, and we fed into each other's enthusiasm.

I practically screamed at my parents over chats, writing delirious messages like "MOMMMMMMMMMMM" to get her attention during the work day and signing off chats with "BYE<3" in all caps. In one chat from early 2010, I interrogated my mom about why she unfollowed me on Google Buzz ("I unfollowed everyone, I don't like Buzz," she replied. "Sorry! I still love you").

On Google Buzz, I jokingly made fun of my friends, created giddy lists of my favorite video games, and tried to coin slang that no one ever adopted. "Wowzafu" was one of them ("um… no," one of my best friends commented).

I wrote all-caps messages screeching about certain YouTubers and made incredibly dramatic posts that read like every event was life or death. "I MIGHTVE FREAKING SPRAINED MY FOOT!!!!!!" I wrote once.

I celebrated my 12th birthday in 2011 with a post: "TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. LOL." I was so hyperactive at the time, I spammed "YAY!" thirteen times in the comments.

"That is so random," a friend calmly replied.

My younger self is teaching me to be goofier as an adult

I was happily shocked by this glimpse of a younger, more expressive version of myself. As I got older, I scrubbed away certain parts of this persona. Like most teenagers, I felt pressure to act chill and unbothered, like I was apathetic toward life. Some of it was just natural maturation, but it was also a defense mechanism. I distinctly recall entering middle school and feeling nervous about being overly expressive, so I gradually muted those parts of myself.

As a high schooler, it embarrassed me to look back on old gushy emails and early social media posts. Instead of trying so hard to be blasé, I wish I'd found a way to embrace that sweetness and eccentricity.

Nowadays, my social media accounts are connected to my job as a journalist, and it feels like there's even more weight on how I carry myself online. It's difficult to be silly and taken seriously in a professional setting: I'm supposed to be representing an institution and I feel thousands of strangers' and colleagues' eyes on me.

Back then, the internet also felt so much more exciting and low-stakes, like playing in a jungle gym where you can't get hurt. I exchanged ornate poems with my grandparents over email, watched fanmade hacks of Pokémon that turned the video game into a kind of narrated romance novel, and played silly and simplistic Adobe Flash games.

Google Buzz's closure at the end of 2011 was a little devastating to me. For almost two years online, it was my haven, a space for me to be an expressive kid with my small bubble of friends. It combined the communal warmth and safety of an app like Discord with the chaotic timeline of Twitter (now X). It doesn't feel like there are any platforms like that on the internet anymore, especially as most social media spaces are supercharged by AI and algorithms. Buzz wasn't ad-filled and hate-dominated like Facebook, nor did it mutate into an aspirational FOMO hellscape like Instagram. Buzz was a casual, no-frills space to simply hang out.

I'm glad I still have access to the archive, partly because it feels like every year, one of my main sources of internet delight as a child disappears into the digital void. Club Penguin shut down a few years ago, and Omegle, a chat browser platform that I enjoyed surfing on as a tween, was terminated in November after it settled a case related to sexual abuse facilitation allegations. Rumors about Poptropica, another personal favorite that involves solving puzzles across a universe of futuristic cyber worlds, shutting down this week also momentarily bummed me out before I realized it was a hoax. Even though I don't play these games anymore as an adult, it feels sweet to vicariously experience the good times I had as a child through my saved posts and chats.

The archive also serves as a daily reminder to me today, a 24-year-old working adult, to resist tempering my emotions. I'm no longer annoyed at myself for being goofy, and there's no reason why I should curate the way I speak to suit an invisible "professional" audience. No one becomes an adult and automatically loses all the eccentric tics and inane mannerisms they had as a child. If anything, being open and expressive is more mature than trafficking in meaningless corporatespeak or faking an enigmatic cool-guy persona. I've realized that everyone has the capacity to be ridiculous.

Instead of adhering to an image of what I should be, I plan to let my rawest thoughts fly (of course, appropriately, and not just any intrusive thought).

Every day I'm trying to let that part of me breathe. I'm taking cues from an 11-year-old me on how to be my full, joyous self online.