By chance I found myself wandering back to my old LiveJournal account. From the summer of 2001 through early 2007, I chronicled my joys, frustrations, and confusions for an audience of whomever happened to drop by. I filed entries from all kinds of moods (chipper, depressed, bitter, ironic, prayerful) and locations (Charlotte, Chapel Hill, New Zealand, Maine, New York). Needless to say, it was a total mess of the intensely personal spilling out into public view.
I was surprised, though, by the sympathetic comments that people left even on some of the weirdest entries. It's hard for me to see how the writing and posting of this stuff could have helped me, beyond giving the illusion of confession without real confession. But the comments—those were just wonderful, and probably redeemed the enterprise on some level.
In the last few months, I had realized I used the LiveJournal to create a false intimacy. By the end, I was just posting quotes without commentary, drawing back as far as I could from the emotional outbursts that had punctuated the journal for most of its existence. And so I finally did what I should have done a while ago: drawn a veil over the best and worst times of my life.
It was something like burying a bunch of old letters in the backyard.
Did anybody else have one of these things, or was it just me?
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3 comments:
i had a deadjournal and a livejournal...how sad is that.
Not sad if we all did it.
Yeah dude, only mine were set to music and I charged people for them.
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