This essay is sponsored by Ioana, who is similarly affected by LiveJournal nostalgia.
Recently, while searching in the Narnian depths of my closet, I found my first-ever diary, a small, perfectly ’80s plastic-back book with a busted lock. When I was nine or ten, I marred the cover with handwritten bon mots from Ferngully, such as “You are one bodacious babe” and “Awesome use of the language, dude.” Within the pink and teal pages of the diary, though, I’m seven years old, growing up on a rural farm in central Illinois. I write mostly about my plans for the evening or the next day, usually sleepovers with my friends or visits with family. My girlfriends and apparently I read each other’s diaries during sleepovers; I mention several times that my best friend, Joni, is reading “not this journal, but the paperback one” as I write.
I made my first LiveJournal post at age sixteen, writing about my first break-up. I’d been online since middle school and had written about life there for years, coding websites in Notepad by cherry-picking the HTML from other sites I liked, just like many other girls I’d meet online in the next few years. We posted vague bios about ourselves. We changed our names. Our identities were fluid and often hidden, without the permanence of digital photos to anchor them. We wrote poetry. We claimed space on Tripod and Geocities, altern.org and scribble.nu and then, as girls bought their own domains and shared the paid space with their friends, we moved in with them, prefacing our subdomains with forward slashes. And when girls began to sign up on LiveJournal, we were able to talk to one another, finally in the same room.
I wrote in my LiveJournal while sitting cross-legged at my mom’s desk chair as the sun set over husked Illinois cornfields. On our first-ever computer, a Gateway 2000. Years later, I wrote while slouched on my dorm room floor or hiding my screen in a college computer lab. I wrote at night, after everyone I lived with had gone to bed. I listened to Tori Amos and Iron and Wine and Fiona Apple from CDs I fed to the computer tower and opened in WinAmp. I wrote about myself and my life, in the confessional, navel-gazey way that’s led to the 2015 connotation of the word. To LiveJournal: to write messily about your feelings.
I posted on LiveJournal throughout high school, strapping on my cheap headphones and plucking from the words piling up in my teenage heart. I wrote about the revelations of play rehearsal three nights a week, about shouting to my classmates from our respective cars in the school parking lot, about reading Sylvia Plath for the first time and literally hugging the book after finishing the last page. I fell in love, the way I knew falling in love should be—suddenly and joyously. I typed out the text of my first college acceptance letter and posted it on LiveJournal.
I wrote about starting my first job, at a bookstore, how the manager training me gestured to the shelves and asked if anyone had “taught (me) about Romance yet”—she was talking about protocol for shelving the novels, but I shivered with delight, illegally signed in to LiveJournal on a staff computer a few minutes later to tell my friends list about the turn of phrase. I loved Letters to a Young Poet and Rilke’s quote “If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.” I wanted to make poetry out of life, to believe that life was good and beautiful, and when I was younger, that never seemed difficult. I posted on LiveJournal most days, often with a great sense of relief that it was finally time to write it all down. I bound zines full of writing I’d posted on LiveJournal; I got into college using essays I’d started on LiveJournal. The world seemed to always be shedding those riches Rilke spoke of, shiny coins from shallow pockets. I wanted to collect them, keep them all, warm them in my palms.
In college, I had my first glass of wine, alone with a boy who was not my boyfriend, and LiveJournal was the only one I told. I wrote frantically on LiveJournal when my infant cousin was rushed to the hospital and I grieved on LiveJournal the next day when she died at ten months old. I wrote about going home and staying up all night with my friends, walking to a nearby graveyard with them at 3am, how a star fell above us as we walked home on the deserted highway.
Reading back, of course, it’s all a little precious, all a little LiveJournal. I was figuring out that I was a writer, but I was also young, I was very sure about many incorrect things, I felt ready for life without having any realistic idea of what life was actually like. In short, I was a teenage girl. It reassured me to filter everything, as it happened, through words. The best way for me to comprehend my own life was to read it back to myself.
And I knew I wasn’t alone. The girls who read my LJ, and vice versa, were doing the same; they, too, believed their lives were at least worth documenting, and so we were hungry together, reaching out toward the details in one another’s lives like vines toward the sun; we loved each other, celebrated surprise joys and consoled atomic hurt. We joined communities to learn to knit and to share poetry and to post photos of ourselves. We created new usernames to symbolize new directions in our lives–one for college, one for poetry, one for only extra-secret secrets. LiveJournal was a neverending sleepover for us sentimental storytellers, teenagers who were feeling every feeling. The sun was just about to come up. We had plenty of snacks. We passed our diaries around the circle.
In the LJ archives of my dear friend Courtney, there’s a post she made in 2002, as a teenage girl:
man this thing works. its like all the badness escapes when you write it down.
I stopped using LiveJournal years ago, though I gave it up in fits, came crawling back to create temporary friends-only journals that now sit dormant with only four or five posts. LiveJournal ended with a whisper; all the other girls I’d gotten to know over nearly a decade on the site stopped using it, too, seemingly within the same few months. Many of us moved to Tumblr, where there was no comment function, and our personal posts became rarer and rarer and—in my case, anyway—eventually stopped.
Last fall, after hearing about TinyLetter, a personal newsletter service, I signed up for an account. For several weeks, I sent out letters that were bad versions of other people’s fascinating TinyLetters. Finally, after some weeks of floundering, I sat down at the end of a hard day at work and wrote a letter about how I felt—very scared and lost at thirty-one. I stared out my office windows. I cried a little. I just feel like I see these lives I imagined for myself all over the place sometimes, walking around, being real. Where I’d normally sent several draft iterations to my inbox, I barely even proofread this letter. “Are you sure?” TinyLetter asked. I wasn’t. I clicked Yes, send it now and went home.
I can’t shake the memory that writing was easy in the LiveJournal days; I remember sitting at that computer desk in my childhood home, writing about my innermost joys, and pausing at the keyboard, my fingers poised over the keys. I shut my eyes and waited, knowing the next words would come soon—and they always did. Whether they came only because I believed they would, or vice versa, I still don’t know. But in the same way I knew the words would come, I knew that life would always be good to me, that its riches would always be clear to me; or at least that I could be “poet enough” to seek them out.
At the same time, I was shot through with loss since my adolescent days, terrified of how quickly time slipped by. I wrote about my life with a sense of urgency, as if documenting it could save me from getting older, as a way to cling to the hours. I stretched my minutes before bedtime to post on LiveJournal, my parents hovering in the doorway. I forced myself to stay awake on late study nights to post on LiveJournal. Weekends home from college, I held my breath, waiting for my Grandma’s ancient iMac to connect to her rural internet, so I could write on LiveJournal about the dinner we’d just had as my whole big family talked and laughed in the next room.
The reference to “the paperback one” in my childhood diary is the only indication I have that the paperback diary ever existed. I can’t find it; I don’t remember it. But I wrote about it once.
I signed in to LiveJournal recently and felt a pang of familiarity while reading the usernames on my Friends list. Even the usernames of people with whom I’ve lost touch evoked clear, hollering memories: what they were like, where they lived, who they loved. Clicking through the list of names yields lots of final posts that read “I wish I still wrote here” or “I wish LJ wasn’t so deserted.”
After I sent out my messy TinyLetter, readers and friends responded with emails and texts. I stood in my dark driveway and read them on my phone, feeling the same small lift that a bold 1 comment link gave me in the LiveJournal days, a feeling so familiar and specific that it swayed nostalgic, like listening to a mix tape I’d made as a teenager.
One of the emails was from a girl I met on LiveJournal as a teenager; she expressed amazement that my stepson is so old now, gratefulness for the TinyLetter, the easy way it led us to reconnect after so long. She wrote, “We have only ever known each other on the internet, but still.”
LiveJournal friends are still so ubiquitous in my life that I often forget how we met. Many are (still) writers. When I scroll through my Twitter feed, I see my LiveJournal friends. When I got married, LiveJournal friends stood in the sun and cheered. We’ve known and loved each other for well over a decade. We’ve listened to one another’s daily lives and confessions and complaints. Most of us have never met in person or even talked on the phone, but we’ve read each others’ diaries and found ourselves there. It’s true that we’ve only ever known each other on the internet.
But still.
Lindsey Gates-Markel's work has most recently been published in Little Fiction, WhiskeyPaper, and The Rumpus. She writes feelings-y emails through her newsletter, Dear Livejournal.
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bookwormV 119p · 181 weeks ago
(I got into it in my late teens, after its glory days had passed. But it is still where I have made and maintained a lot of friendships, and it's still an important part of my life.)
anachronistique 115p · 181 weeks ago
(I still check my flist every day, and I have a few friends that still post often, but man, it's quiet.)
(I've visited friends all over that I met on LJ. I've met their spouses and held their babies.)
(LJ friends helped save my life.)
(ENOUGH PARENTHETICALS)
Nicole Callahan · 181 weeks ago
jaeferous 102p · 181 weeks ago
Core Women's Sneakers Windham Grasshoppers Pewter Keds Canvas My account is still there, and on the (very) odd days that I post to my DW, I'll crosspost to that LJ. I don't think anyone follows me anymore, but I can't stop. I miss that place and who I was back then.
crl 122p · 181 weeks ago
Some of my closest Internet friends are people I've met through LJ. I remember the thrill of excitement whenever the friendship would graduate from LJ to exchanging friend requests on Facebook, or finally agreeing to meet up in person. My LJ community encouraged my horrible early attempts at fanfic; they've always backed my crazy ideas and were nothing but supportive when I made the leap into more "mainstream" writing ventures.
Pouring one out for the good old days of LJ right now.
Eleanor London HUGSY Boot Shellys Black Women's Floral qw6zE8 · 181 weeks ago
I actually still use LJ, but instead of whispering at a slumber party, it's more like shouting into a void most days.
LJ people are MY people, and they are the BEST people. Your tumblr could never.
ann1011 122p · 181 weeks ago
dianaH 96p · 181 weeks ago
LJ sent me a sad little email yesterday, about bringing your friends back to the site. Somehow I don't see that happening. LJ now, for me, is just a journal.
Anyway this piece is great. Thank you, Lindsey.
beyoncepadthai1 132p · Pratesi in Woman Womens Bag Leather Emerald Leather Cow Roccastrada Emerald in Italian rwFIqxzdr
auldsampeabody 101p · 181 weeks ago
allreb 95p · 181 weeks ago
I identified with all of this, but none so much as the paragraph about learning HTML, websites on tripod, and desperately wanting your own domain. That was such a huge part of my high school life - and yep, it culminated with joining LJ the week I graduated high school.
Zoe 93p · 181 weeks ago
james · 181 weeks ago
Both of those websites have given me some of the closest, most intense friendships I've had.
A girl in Denver friended me (in England) on LJ in 2001. Exchanged comments, AIM usernames, the occasional email. In 2008 I was planning to fly over to attend her wedding, and from her LiveJournal history I could see that her fiance was a cheater and all around scumbag. So when she confessed she had a crush on me I told her to call it off and bought her a plane ticket to England. We've been married for almost six years now. Every now and then I'll say to her: You married @alpheius from LiveJournal.
People laugh about LiveJournal but the one thing I miss the most is that every step away from that format has had more of an expectation of an audience and feels more performative, less intimate. Communities on the internet seem less tightly-knit now. Or perhaps 15 years and adulthood has just eroded mine. I used to write about serious difficult things to nobody on LJ, and, somehow, a few people found them, and that more or less implied friendship. Now I say nothing to my actual friends on Facebook.
aravisthequeen 134p · 181 weeks ago
I really miss it. There's nothing like it. Tumblr does not come close, lacking a good comment feature, and Facebook is so drowned in everyday stuff it isn't the same. LJ was so important to me and to fandom and oh god I miss it so much. And I miss my friends--not that I don't still interact with them, which I do, but there was a sense of being involved in their lives in a deep and tangible way.
Phew.
sausagedog 127p · 181 weeks ago
Oh my god, this sentiment. I think about it almost every day when I try to write, and how I used to be so self-assured that what I wrote deserved an audience. Wish I could have bottled that and stored it for later.
I don't even remember my livejournal name, or whether I deleted it. I'd like to go back and check but the information I'd need to dig it up is probably entombed on my old desktop computer at my parents' home. I only really had one "friend" on LJ, she was a year older, lived in Texas (vs. my Wisconsin). She was so cool-- she wore clothes from Urban Outfitters and watched Daria and had a maybe-boyfriend-- but approachably so, I always thought of her as an actual friend, not an idol or anything. We liked the same songs by the Arctic Monkeys and Fall Out Boy, and for her birthday I drew her a picture of her OC. I still have the original, which means I didn't ever work up the nerve to ask for an address to send it to, but I would have scanned it and uploaded it to DeviantArt, I think.
I feel like the Toast comments are often in the same vein of community as LJ had been. Different, but similar. I feel like my LJ friend could be a Toast commenter these days, you know?
Theresa Couchman 155p · 181 weeks ago
Plus all the fandom scenes, which I didn't actively participate in but still kept up with, were incredible (and sometimes frighteningly intense--Harry Potter fandom, even we LOTR fans gazed upon your epic fights with awe) back then. Most of that seems to have migrated over to Tumblr now.
Pear 126p · 181 weeks ago
This is such a wonderful essay, thank you! I can really identify with many parts of it.
I think one reason I got through my teenage years more or less intact was because I had an LJ. On the other hand, some of LJ is deeply unsavoury, as with any site. I'll be the first to admit I was fascinated by LJ comm dramz. Like, I met one of my very best friends through LJ because we were both into loli fashion and so thought it was great fun to yell at people for wearing frilly clothes """wrong""". Thankfully we both changed.
It makes me feel deeply ashamed to know there's concrete evidence that I was a completely garbage teenager a decade ago, and it would be totally fine if people disliked me on that basis. Honestly. I was terrible. I don't even allow myself to think 'Oh but I've come so far now!'--I just want to shove myself down the back of the sofa.
Melanie 117p · 181 weeks ago
Goodbye In Robot · 181 weeks ago
Writing on the Internet did not feel like as much of a performance back then as it does now. I confess I have never really figured out how to grow my Internet-self beyond what it was in about 2005. Livejournal was so formative to me, and yet it ruined me in some ways, too. I have such admiration for those old-school journallers / bloggers who've been able to keep a public personal narrative going over the years.
And the sleepover analogy is perfect -- there was absolutely a sense that my LJ entries, even those marked Public, were secrets my friends would keep. When I realized I needed to censor myself more on LJ, I flailed around until I disappeared back into my fiction writing and let my LJ get old and crusty.
Patent Clog Patent Professional Linen Leather Dansko Women's 0wnETqxZ · 181 weeks ago
catoclock 115p · 181 weeks ago
rallisaurus 101p · 181 weeks ago
Keds Women's Windham Sneakers Grasshoppers Canvas Core Pewter For a huge part of my teens, LiveJournal was my only journal and I poured my heart out into it. It saw some of the darkest and happiest moments of my life. But mostly I just squeed about fanfiction.
winterbymorning 133p · 181 weeks ago
It was very surprising and unsettling to me how fast LJ collapsed on itself, how people who would post multiple times a week or even per day suddenly just stopped cold. I stopped updating mine after I finished undergrad and moved 200 km away for grad school - I had a hard time dealing with the changes (in hindsight I probably had a mild form of depression, but I never thought to get therapy and I eventually got out of it) and didn't feel like writing yet another entry about how much I hated everything. When I came back to LJ after months away, I didn't even have to go back 20 entries on my friends list to catch up. Everyone had just trickled away to Tumblr or other social media platforms or maybe none at all.
LiveJournal led me to my best friend, who's been like a sister to me for 10 years, and to many other friends that I'm still close with. It's strange to think that a website that enriched my life so greatly doesn't seem to have much value to anyone anymore.
gripyfish 109p · 181 weeks ago
Core Windham Keds Pewter Women's Sneakers Canvas Grasshoppers What I miss most about LJ is actually the RP community I joined there, long after I stopped keeping a personal journal myself. The game migrated to another platform a few years ago, and I left not long afterwards, but the people I met there are some of the best friends I ever made.
menysnoweballes 99p · 181 weeks ago
Multi Flats Pewter Simpson Ballet Women's Mandalaye Jessica Wfw46U1q6 100p · Blue Trainer Cross Blue Faze Women's Shoe Ryka Light qBwf8vx
bibliobotic 122p · 181 weeks ago
grlgoddess 117p · 181 weeks ago
Can we just, as a group, decide to all move back?
meetapossum 110p · 181 weeks ago
wrestlethethistles Women's Sneakers Keds Grasshoppers Pewter Canvas Windham Core 96p · 181 weeks ago
This essay is so well observed and I will now be joining the other commenters in a fog of nostalgia for the rest of the day.
thundersnow · 181 weeks ago
Nina Dress Black Smile Sandal Original Women's RqxrXtR 129p · 181 weeks ago
Also, god, the number of quizzes and questionnaires I did back then. Buzzfeed quizzes =/= LJ quizzes.
katenepveu 98p · 181 weeks ago
It's harder because (1) no scheduled posts, and I try not to post time-stamped things during the workday and (2) ineffable feeling that the barrier to production is higher than quickie links elsewhere, but I still read and keep up with people there. Come to Dreamwidth! The features are better than LJ and there's no ads!
deleted3602194 82p · 181 weeks ago
deleted7410012 111p · 181 weeks ago
but livejournal—i wish i hadn't deleted and purged my account. i mean, i understand why i did it, but i feel so removed from who i was in 2001, i wish i could go back and read my thoughts, and read those interactions.
sarahspy 84p · 181 weeks ago
carmencicero 110p · 181 weeks ago
damngoodcoffee 108p · 181 weeks ago
On Livejournal vs. tumblr: I know that the tumblr community is pretty freaking awesome, but I felt like there was a heft and length to LJ posts and discussions that I think tumblr doesn't lend itself to quite as well. I love reading people's seemingly endless fandom-related posts and meta discussions on LJ and weep every time one of them is abandoned and I can no longer read a 20,000-word post on how Buffy season 6 is amazing or how the family dynamics in Harry Potter work or what have you. The deep thoughts and discussions on Livejournal are invaluable to me.
Also, yes, wow, Gateway 2000.
houblonchouffe 123p · 181 weeks ago
As with most things in life, I don't think I used LJ "right," in that I never really made friends or discovered things or met people like so many others did. No one read it, really. I just vomited depression all over it for five years. It served its purpose at its time and now that's done.
RuncibleSpoon 107p · 181 weeks ago
i used to read the whole thing cover to cover occassionally, like a cohesive narrative of self.
redheadedwolf 115p · 181 weeks ago
How I dealt with the records of years of my life I can't bear to look at anymore: I locked them down as private-only, en masse. It helped to know that no one else can see them now. But I have a pretty strong aversion to deleting anything (even to others deleting things -- I see people I don't even know here talking about how they purged their journals, and it makes me SO SAD, I can't look at the comments for long).
Emily 128p · 181 weeks ago
czargasm 124p · 181 weeks ago
tongsandsporks 123p · 181 weeks ago
Chocolate Renee Kidskin Slide Maribeth Women's J 4qz8q 110p · 181 weeks ago
auldsampeabody 101p · 181 weeks ago
I miss it. So much. I miss the safety and comfort of seeing my thoughts appear in the update box. I miss being able to write as prolifically as I did back then. I miss having a built-in supportive audience of readers and friends. I miss learning the ins and outs and mundanities of their lives. I miss feeling like what I was doing and thinking was worth recording.
Making friends has never come easy to me, not in high school, not in college, and certainly not now at the tail end of my 20s. LJ helped immeasurably. The real-life friendships I had in high school and college were strengthened and maintained because we could follow and uncover each other's lives and thoughts in that safe space. And the internet friendships with strangers half a world a way were just as invaluable, sometimes more so.
Although I initially met my girlfriend through another online forum (what up AOL Teen Message Boards circa 2000!), LJ is where our friendship deepened. I highly doubt that we would have made the leap from Online Friends to Live-In Girlfriends without those hundreds and hundreds of LJ entries and late-night comments (...which turned into IMs and then to letters to phone calls to cross-country flights to 5-hour bus rides to moving in together to getting a little annoying cat...the ultimate lesbian achievement).
Windham Keds Pewter Core Women's Sneakers Grasshoppers Canvas I have a tumblr, which is fun and addicting, and I've sort of gotten to know a couple of people through there, but it is nowhere near the same. I'm wary of posting anything too personal there. It's not conducive to long posts, and everything just seems so much more...temporary and transient. And then there's the lack of effective commenting system. The commentariat here is the only thing that has come close to LJ in the community sense (but not necessarily in the sharing-my-life sense, as I'm paranoid and this is a public, highly popular website).
It's hard to lose something that has been a constant for almost half your life.
...Probably should have posted this feelingsvomit in LJ, huh.
Multi Flats Pewter Simpson Ballet Women's Mandalaye Jessica Wfw46U1q6 100p · 181 weeks ago
CleverManka 138p · 181 weeks ago
rangiferina 95p · 181 weeks ago
On the positive side, some of the comms are still quite active and vibrant, and I definitely value the, well, community provided by one of them in particular. Even in these twilight years of LJ. :) All in all, though, I don't think we'll ever go back to the heyday of the mid-00s... too much has changed in social media-land, and some things just can't be replicated. I don't know.
David · 181 weeks ago
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