Illustration: Peter Espina/GT

One day while refreshing Weibo - which occupies about 80 percent of my waking hours these days - I decided to go over my own profile. I clicked through pages of posts and comments, three years of meticulously phrased and beautifully written posts about, well, food, the weather and pets.

Well, not really. As I scanned the pages, I felt strange, as if I was reading someone else's microblog. I said that? Why did I do that? Some of them were meaningless quibbles, some mean, nasty rants and some naïve.

I felt embarrassed. Not only by the naiveté of the younger self, but, worse, by the thought that these posts are public. Everybody can see them.

It's different from your diaries. There surely are things in those "Dear Diary" entries that seem embarrassing or stupid to us now, but we take comfort in the fact that these are private, that unless our parents snoop around and find it, or if we one day become famous and these diaries become public, we will be the sole reader of these.

But the Internet is different. It's open to everyone, for one thing. And it's forever. You can try your best to delete a post, but you can never scrub it clean from cyberspace.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the Internet needs a delete button. I could get on board with this idea. Sure, all the microblog posts, comments and Facebook updates are part of who we were and the things we've done. But they aren't always warm and fuzzy bits of nostalgia. Sometimes they can be painful reminders of mistakes you've made and will haunt you wherever you go.

Job applicants are now asked by potential employees for their social media accounts so that HR can check up to see what comments you posted, what pages you liked, who you socialize with and so on. There you may have a problem. Some goofy stuff you did one drunken night in college doesn't look exactly like executive material.

Can people change? Do we believe that people can change? I have mixed feelings about that. But I guess we generally believe that people deserve a second chance, especially for things we did when we were young. That's why juvenile criminal records are usually sealed and in some cases expunged.

But who is there to seal away your mistakes on the Internet, where making hasty comments is easy. Not only easy, but the norm. What we say in 140 words is probably not the best representation of what we mean, especially things we say in the heat of the moment that may be completely different from when we calm down and think things through.

I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat over some of the things that I have said or done when I was younger. But I'm also relieved that these snippets of memory exist in my mind only.

Even the best of us make mistakes. It's one thing for us to acknowledge the fact that we've made a mistake, but it's quite another that the stains follow us for the rest of our lives and we are forever judged by them.