Blogging as a way to find the people who care

This blog entry is - as probably many others in the future will be - an expansion upon a few posts I made on Blorbo a couple days ago.

A few days ago I got an email from Livejournal saying it was the 16th anniversary of my first LJ account- Which surprised me because I’d genuinely forgotten I’d switched LJ accounts after a point. The change was done entirely because of my username back then: I no longer liked my handle but account rename tokens cost money and I was thereabouts of 14 at the time, so what I did was painstakingly copy/paste my entries to the account I used until around 2012 and then imported to Dreamwidth.

I shoot a quick post (that evolves into that small thread on blorbo and now into this post) about that on my private twitter as I have Dreamwidth import the entries. I hadn’t read the entry where I said I’d already copied the entries over when I moved accounts before I hit “start import” but just shrugged since one can never have too many backups, just to make sure I kept everything captured, ready in case one day I needed to go down memory lane.

Which uh. I don’t actually do that often? 😅

It’s actually pretty difficult for me to read teenage me’s LJ entries. I called it physically painful on Blorbo and I stand by it. Not because I was a painfully cringe kid or anything of the sort, I mean, I was, as any young teen is, it’s just…

Teenage Citro posted on LJ about old ladies who’d been annoying to her in the pool locker room, recommended Yaoi manga I was very much NOT old enough to be reading¹, joyfully kept a tally of my middle school grades (Always took care not to share over-identifying details but I’d mention it was unfair to only get a 17 in English) that probably doesn’t exist anywhere else now but in those dusty bits and bytes because I sure threw out a lot of my school materials from back then.

And I think the observations that made me want to blog about this here are that a) I can’t quite post like that anymore, as I simply no longer have the openness I had back then and b) that regargless, I envy that openness tremendously.

That’s what actually makes it hard to read. I was definitely a lot less vague than I am on public facing internet these days, and I do know that I’m less open than the norm. After all as much as there’s less of an issue with image hosting these days it’s probably not a good idea to post selfies where I talk about my smut writing, even if it’ll be fairly obvious that I’m one of the many brown eyed brunettes in Portugal.

That openness got lost in the process of growing up, becoming more privacy conscious and feeling like no one cares about your day-to-day, but at the same time… Part of why to this day I still have some sort of online presence, why I decided to brush up my front end skills to make this here site, is because I’m still chasing the feeling I had when I wrote there.

On LJ, on forums, on Blogspot, on the Wordpress site I somehow set up from scratch without knowing a thing of SQL once, even after I got bullied out of using it after a point. I wrote like I trusted I’d find the people who care. And that really is the goal still. Even if more hope than teenage certainty, I still think that’s how I connect and make friends with others online: If not always through day-to-day blogging, then by the fiction I write, the quick tweets or toots, the art and all other things I love and compliment others for and share enthusiastically.

And I think it’s good for me to put that down here as a manifesto of sorts. 😊

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