Ten Backups of Myself: Reading a Decade of About Pages Like a Stranger's Diary

The folder was labeled, without ceremony, "old_site_backups." Inside it sat ten zipped archives of my own website, one for nearly every year since 2014, saved the way you save anything — dutifully, absentmindedly, assuming you'd never open them again.

I opened them anyway. What I found was not a portfolio. It was a diary I didn't know I was keeping.

The Inflation Years

The 2014 version introduces me as a "multi-disciplinary creative strategist and brand storyteller." I had been freelancing for eleven months. I had two clients, one of whom was my cousin's catering business. The title was doing the heavy lifting that the work could not yet do, and I suspect I knew it. That's why the sentence was so long. Long sentences feel like experience.

By 2016, I had added the word "results-driven." By 2017, I was a "seasoned" storyteller, which is a remarkable thing to call yourself with three years of seasoning. Reading these in sequence, I could see the anxiety underneath every adjective. Each inflated title was a small insurance policy against the fear that I would be found out. I was not trying to describe myself. I was trying to preemptively answer a question I was terrified of: who do you think you are?

The Crash, and the Plain Talk

Something shifted in the 2019 backup. The bio got shorter. "I write things for companies, and sometimes the writing helps," it said, roughly. I remember being embarrassed by that draft at the time — it felt like undressing in a conference room. But it was the first version a stranger could actually read without translating.

I had stopped writing to impress the version of myself I wanted to become and started writing to be understood by the people who might hire me. That pivot didn't come from confidence. It came from exhaustion. Buzzwords are heavy, and I had been carrying them up the same hill for five years.

What the Sequence Reveals

Here is the part I didn't expect. Reading the pages one after another, I could see pivots I never noticed while living them. The 2020 version quietly drops all mention of social media management — a career I had genuinely mourned letting go of, gone without a eulogy. The 2022 version mentions teaching for the first time, three semesters before I thought of myself as a teacher.

The bio was always ahead of me. I updated it when the change was already true but not yet admitted. If you want to know what you actually believe about your career, don't journal about it. Look at what you published about yourself and when.

A Recommendation, Offered Gently

I'm not suggesting you keep every backup forever, though the cloud makes it nearly free to do so. I am suggesting that your current About page is a data point, not a verdict. Read it against the one from three years ago. Notice what disappeared. Notice what you inflated. Notice the sentence that finally sounds like a person talking.

The person in the 2014 archive was not wrong, exactly. She was just loud, in the way people are loud when they're scared. The person writing this paragraph is trying to be quieter. Ask me in ten years which one of us the backups flatter.