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Creating archives of self
May. 6th, 2024 07:37 amI'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.
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.
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.
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.
