November 28, 2012 | 11:57 am

Digging Up History

Posted by Ben Spielberg

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When I was younger, I had the annoying inclination to make a name for myself. I hated everyone (I still do, for the most part), but I wanted everyone to love me. I wanted my name to be heard of by everyone, my true personality known by few, and my externalities respected by all who came across my path.

I wanted my blogs to evoke powerful emotions, my MySpace profiles to provide witty commentary on not just my life, but everyone else’s as well. I wanted to post pictures that struck every walk of life with familiarity and necessity.

For the most part, I failed. When I look back, my e-biographies were pretentious and vague; my images were blurred and melodramatic representations of what actually happened in my life. My public songs were off-key, disjointed, and incoherent.

I know how the process works. I had a poor self-image, and I tried to project something greater than I was. However, transparency struck through my opaque reflections. This is a process that does not concern me; I’m concerned instead by the process of which I could write something, deem it beautiful, and then look at it later in life and be utterly embarrassed by it.

Am I embarrassed at myself for submitting various forms of nonsense publicly, or am I embarrassed about the way I viewed myself when I was younger? I want to argue for the former, but I know the truth lies in the latter. The substance of the historical Ben Spielberg is contrived; it is misrepresented information that unveils neither genuine emotion nor actual content. If one were to attempt to find information about me, one would find only a mask that I tried to pass off as my own face.

Nobody loved me because nobody knew me, or knew what I actually stood for--instead they had only an idea of pessimistic sarcasm or nonlinear punch lines. My name may have been known, but not in the way that I had intended. My true personality was not known by few--it was known by none.