Creating archives of self

[halojedha]

I've been re-reading my 2002-2005 livejournals, which take me from halfway through my last year at school through my time at university - so far I've read up to the summer after I finished my undergraduate degree, before starting my mPhil. I'm having SO MANY thoughts and feelings in reaction to them. It's really immense. There's so much stuff I'd forgotten! Little stuff, but big stuff too - the details I recorded at the time differ significantly in some ways from the memories I'd retained, and there are quite a lot of things that felt huge at the time but which completely slipped away over the intervening twenty years. The private (just for me) entries in particular are an absolute goldmine of honest feelings and details too private to share with anyone - a real treasure trove of self-archaeology. 

 

One consequence of this is a real desire to start online journalling again. I've been paper journalling in notebooks for the last ten years, but not very often and only when I have FEELS to process. This means the journals are a bit harder to re-discover - they're split between various notebooks, and I can't read them on my phone - and they mostly include the stuff I'm struggling with, but less of the lovely and fun and hilarious stuff which I'm really enjoying rediscovering in my livejournal of yore.  I'm struck by the enormous value of being able to re-encounter myself of twenty years ago - in some ways very familiar and aligned with my sense of myself, and in other ways a total stranger whose life is unknown until I discover it - and I'm already grieving the loss of those detailed memories from the last fifteen years since I stopped documenting my personal life and relationships in this way. Which is why I'm popping up on dreamwidth again.

I'm also grieving the loss of the community I had on livejournal. I had such close friendships with people, many of whom I was intimate with offline as well as online. I feel pretty solid about making the switch from LJ to dreamwidth after reports of how the Russians exploited LJ to persecute LGBTQ people, but I left a lot of my best friends behind when I moved. After a decade I imagine most of them have left LJ too. My DW friendslist is interesting, but includes very few of the people I'm closest to; they're either on Discord (where I've been pretty active for the last few years) or Facebook (which I also have ethical objections to, and have therefore used very little for the last ten years; and in any case it's pretty useless as a personal archive). I can post links to public DW entries on Facebook and people will see them, but I'm less and less inclined to post personal stuff publicly.

 

One of the things holding me back from online journalling over the last 15 years has been that a lot of my biggest news has felt too private to share. But if I'm using it more as a personal archive than as a social network, private or heavily filtered entries solve that problem. Another obstacle has been lack of time around parenting - if I post about my day on Discord or in an instant message to one of my close people, I have limited time/energy for saying it all again in a journal. But in the old days I split my communication between telling close people about stuff through LJ and telling them about it directly, so I'm wondering if sharing journal entries could potentially complement texts and voice notes as a way to keep in touch and stay involved with people's lives - especially if I could persuade people to get an account so the posts don't have to be public. The livejournal user interface makes this precious self-chronicle so much easier to read and rediscover than digging through texts and discord messages, which would take quite a lot of work to archive, and involve wading through a lot of non-chronicle communications to get the juicy archival bits.

Handwriting is more somatic, and better suited to figuring out hard ideas or processing emotions - there's something about the mind-body linkup and the forced slowdown of the thought process which is in itself helpful and therapeutic. So written journals still have a place. But typing is substantially quicker, and comments are a source of dopamine, so dreamwidth is much better for recording what happened and motivating me to post.

In the end I only have so much free time, and life is really busy, which makes it impossible to create any kind of thorough or exhaustive record of what happened. One of my friends keeps a three-lines-a-day paper journal, which is short enough to feel doable every day, but I think my old livejournal rhythm of 1-3 longer posts a week is likely to suit me better. I would love it if I could combine emotional processing, creating an historical record for the benefit of my future self, and connecting with the people I love most into one efficient package, just like livejournal did twenty years ago, but in this post-diaspora age of social media I'm not sure that will ever happen again. Still, perhaps there are ways: getting into the habit of copying my discord posts and DMs here as private posts, for instance, or finding a good handwriting-to-text converter and uploading paper journals. Even if my archives are scattered across notebooks, messaging apps and here, posting at least some stuff here feels like a really valuable way to improve the quality of the record for my future self.

Comments

[sfred]

Hello! It's good to see you here more.

I'm in a Slack with a smallish group of close friends, and I do often copy posts from there to here so I can see them in future, as well as so friends here can see them.

[halojedha]

Thank you! It's good to be here more :)

Yes, I think copying posts is the way forward. In fact this post started out as a DM to a loved one :)

[sickandgloomy]

hey! i found this post while scrolling through the "latest things" page, and i'm really glad i did, because it really resonates with me. i don't have the history with LJ and journal sites in general that you mention having, but i'm also a journaller (been journalling in various notebooks, on-and-off, for almost 10 years now) and i've been having a lot of the same thoughts and concerns about handwritten journals vs chronicling my life in different bits and scraps across texts and discord DMs, so it feels really reassuring in an unexpected way to know someone else feels the same way! i appreciated you mentioning heavily filtered / private posts on dreamwidth, because it got me thinking about ways i could use them for my own purposes that i haven't considered before. so thank you for posting this, because it gave me a lot of food for thought! i took the liberty of subscribing, too (⌒‿⌒) i hope you have a good day!

[halojedha]

Hello, and thank you for alerting me to the existence of the "latest things" page! There's definitely a trade-off between dependence and usability - having my archives saved on livejournal makes them vulnerable to deletion or losing a password (I've already lost the passwords to several locked journals), but if you can get access and as long as they're kept, it's way more convenient than trying to organise paper records. I've also recently discovered an old hard drive backup which contains various text files of journalling that never made it onto livejournal, so now I'm wondering about creating an offline backup of my LJ and including those bits into it... all takes time though!

[wildeabandon]

I wish I did more journalling these days, either on here or privately - I always find it so helpful when I do it, but am terrible at making the time.

I remember going back to read my early journal entries a few years ago and found it quite painful - about equal measure being embarassed by my, well, teenageness, and aching with sympathy for the poor kid. Perhaps I should give it another try...

[halojedha]

I'm very glad for all the journalling you do! I've been missing you dreadfully after catching up on the Cambridge years, so I'm very pleased to see recent posts from you - so few of the friends I/we had back then are still active.

I really hear you on those mixed feelings. I've had a *tonne* of processing to do over the last few weeks. It's been pretty healing overall, but has also taken up quite a lot of emotional and mental bandwidth!

[pauraque]

In the LJ days I didn't post about personal stuff very much, so looking back on it sheds more light on how I wanted to present myself than on what was really going on with me. I have actually been using a private-locked DW as my personal journal for about 12 years now, though it does have a tendency to focus on crises and venting rather than daily life. One of my projects for this year is making my primary DW a more integrated presentation of myself.

[halojedha]

Oh interesting - yes I definitely find I value the personal posts most; the film/TV reviews are the least interesting, and the memes are only valuable if they're funny. But it's the heartfelt stuff that feels most helpful for me to weave back in to my personal narrative. The benefits of being a chronic oversharer!

That's so cool that you're using a private DW as your personal journal. I can really see the use of doing it that way. Perhaps it's just that I came of age on LJ, but I still find the UI incredibly straightforward.

I look forward to learning more about you!

[pauraque]

<3

[doseybat]

Quite a number of my old UK and USA lj contacts are still there or still checking in - and so are many of the Russian opposition incidentally - I was embarrassed to have not known that Navalny originally built his following up on LJ.. my method nowadays tends to be typing out an email first. By the time I have written the email to a person(s), it has become apparent whether the email is also/instead a DW/LJ/FB/other etc item.

[doseybat]

PS and anyone reading this and wishing to support the Russian opposition please do go to https://meduza.io

[halojedha]

Thank you for injecting some nuance into my comments about the fate of LJ! I don't really do social emailling any more, with the exception of one or two friends who don't use messaging apps. But yeah, even back then a lot of my posts started out life as emails!

I did go back and check my old LJ friends page out of interest, but there were only two posts on it. I guess no-one else has posted anything lately.

[wychwood]

I came across this on my network page, and just wanted to say thank you for posting it! It made me think about how and why I journal - I've definitely had that experience of looking back at very old posts and meeting my younger self there.

[halojedha]

Ooh, is a network page a page of your friends' friends posts? If so I've been wondering how to find mine.

I've never read old journals *this* old before. It's been really cool to get an outsider perspective on baby me - and to watch me grow up really quite quickly from a teenager who feels like a stranger to an adult self I recognise as being me.

[wychwood]

Ooh, is a network page a page of your friends' friends posts? If so I've been wondering how to find mine.

Yep! This is mine. I think you have to have a paid account to get one, though.

[halojedha]

Ah! Thank you. That is seriously tempting - I had a permanent LJ account but have only been free on DW so far!

[finch]

I think that's a wonderful way to think about it. My spouse and I put a lot of random stuff in discord messages (and before that in google chat and AIM, I suppose) but there's definitely something to be said for journal entries I can look back at, especially as a parent.

[halojedha]

Mmm yes, I'm actually a bit sad about how little of E's life I've managed to journal, although as well as the stuff on DW I have filled a couple of notebooks, and there's a friends and family signal chat for sharing photos and videos and stuff. I'd love to back that up, actually - it's a great record.

[kaberett]

I am delighted to probably be seeing more of you here!