rilah

a post only moderately about livejournal

cyle:

audience has never bothered me. i won’t say i don’t care about my audience, or that i am beholden to them, or that i tailor my work explicitly for them, but i will agree that i am conscious of them. but they don’t bother me.

i recently re-read my entire livejournal, which i wrote from 2003 to 2008 (the peak years behing 2003-2006; dropped off considerably when i got to college) and i’ve made a few key insights into High School Me.

firstly, that having an audience and knowing my audience has never stopped me from being personal in my writing. i cannot remember some of myself from then — it was awhile ago — but i like to think i just didn’t care. i wrote some shit that directly called out the people who i knew read it (mine was a public LJ at the time and i was LJ “friends” with a few of my classmates on there) and i exposed my feelings quite readily to them. reading it back now, i feel as though i didn’t know enough about my own feelings to care about how others’ may have read about them. do i care who reads this tumblr? yes and no. importantly, no, but incidentally yes. i’m not afraid of the truth and who will read it, but i am amused when that truth gets brought up in other contexts.

secondly, i dragged myself through a lot of mud. i saw a lot of shit and heard about a lot of shit, but the shit that should have really affected me never did. the drugs and the sex type stuff never bugged me, for some reason i already found it rather boring, and never really took part in it. furthermore, i resented the “heightened ideologies” of those people who did, (and still do,) very heavily and very publicly. 

but a motif that recurs often in the entries are drawn out bouts of depression and elaborate introspection. i concede to eddie murphy on this issue: i didn’t really honestly have anything to be depressed about, nor did i really have enough of a personality to be deeply introspective, so i made a big deal out of what small things there were. (what teenager doesn’t?) i used these simple things to explore larger problems, ones that i didn’t have (yet) but i thought would be worth talking about. i never lied, but i played up the essence of it all to bring myself somewhere i might be beyond comfortable writing about. i say that now, in hindsight, but at the time i was just bored and lonely and that made me depressed. rather than do something about it, like be social, i decided to bury myself in writing. a lot of it. even when i had a girlfriend.

thirdly, i was and still am extremely verbose. i’ve always written walls of text. i am not afraid to sit down and keep writing when i feel like it, so my real struggle has been the evolution of my editing process and making myself comfortable with writing about anything. the downsides to this? i spend a lot of time writing and thinking. it’s a downside, but it’s not a regret. i’ve spent enough time with myself to be confident in my choices, whether i understand them at the time or not. i understand most of them now, or i know that i don’t. i could not have reached the conclusions i draw from now without having written down so many of my thoughts.

what i keep coming back to is the nature of the livejournal itself. why did i keep it. the form of it is so much like a facebook or a twitter in data alone, but not in appearance. if they had made it so livejournal’s main page showed a simple stream of all your friends’ posts, would it have been more popular? or if it had limited the character length of a post? i’m not sure; i am sure that i see little difference between it and a facebook or a twitter account, from a development standpoint. but on a personal level: why was i writing? i started shortly after a friend of mine did, for no other reason than to write publicly. i kept writing not for them, but for me. i didn’t want to have a history or chronicle so much as i just wanted to write, as is the nature of the internet. put yourself out there for no other reason than to put yourself out there. i still am. but who would i write for? the people who followed me on livejournal, or the people who follow me on here? am i conscious of them enough to tailor my work for them? i don’t think so. the audience doesn’t bother me. i bother me.

that livejournal, and this post itself, are both derivations that are helping me navigate my current projects. subjects only moderately about subjects.