The Ghost of LiveJournals Past
The other day, I received a bone-chilling email. Congratulations on your LiveJournal milestone: twenty years!
The fuck?! Once I got over the shock of hearing from a website from beyond the grave, I was gripped by the sudden terror that my babyish thoughts were still out there, publicly facing, still searchable. 2004 was a moment where my provincial understanding of the internet was: (A) how would anyone outside my intended audience of 3 even find it, and (B) if you weren’t the intended audience for something on the internet, surely you would simply ignore it! Obviously, I wouldn’t survive a day as a teenager today.
I don’t buy into Halloween; everyone knows it’s the holidays that are the prime time for hauntings. My youngest niece, for one, can attest, having recently made her one-line theatrical debut in a community theatre musical rendition of A Christmas Carol, eating pizza backstage with the Ghosts of Christmases Past and Yet to Come. For us adults, ‘tis the season to visit your parents’ home and unearth all sorts of ephemera; shades of your former selves. Surely many of you will find yourselves confronted with the ghosts of your own Christmas Pasts in your childhood bedrooms by this time next week.
A few months ago, I went through a thought experiment with some friends: what would you tell your 28 year old self? What wisdom would the “me” of ten years ago need to hear from me now? I wasn’t able to answer the question honestly. I felt I had no advice to offer. What I actually needed, I contended, was advice from myself ten years from now. The Christmases-yet-to-come guy, right? With any luck by 48 I’ll have worked some of it out.
What I hadn’t considered — until my confrontation with the walking dead LiveJournal — was the inversion of this question. Not how I might advise my younger self, but what she might reveal to me. What would my 18 year old self want to tell me now? I scoured my entries for prognostications and hidden wisdom.
September, 2004:
Okay, maybe not wisdom, per say. A mild insight would suffice. I continued to sift. Deeply embarrassing interpersonal ramblings. Frustrations with abstract math that I now find indecipherable. Inane people-watching observations from my job on closing shift at the glass-walled music library. An almost clinical accounting of my interactions with a cute guy on the tennis team, with whom I believed I shared an intensely magnetic but conveniently wordless flirtation during a weekly seminar – and whom I truly have zero memory of today. (Sorry, guy! You meant something to me!)
For completeness, I even cross-referenced my paper diary from this era, the entries from which I found alternately even more pervy and more banal than their online counterpoints. (But with occasional moments of loveliness!) I only found one bit of the prognostication I had hoped for, a small callout from the Past girlie to the Yet-to-Come one.
November, 2004: “Name 2 things you want to do before you die: (1) create a magnum opus - something beautiful; something of me. (2) exact change on my environment. Define and understand what’s around me.”
Having scrolled to the bitter end of 2004, it became clear my now-19 year old self didn’t have that much to teach me. I am still her. And in many ways I’m not sure what I could have told her from my perch at 39 that, on some level, she didn’t already know:
December, 2004: “I’m a work [in progress] right now, so life is exciting. Good night”
The weekly radio show list: