my online journal

Hi. Long time no blog.

Many things have happened since I last posted something.

Many things even happened since I first posted something. On here, but I’m also talking about the very first incarnations of this online journal thing.

I realised something. Since I started my very first online journal, more than half my life ago, there have been many things that I wanted to post about, but simply did not have the time or courage for.

Sharing things is complicated. Having a private online journal is all fair and well. In the good old days of greatestjournal and livejournal we knew who was reading what. We’d post very regularly, weekly or even daily, and that’s what I liked about blogs, they were really like diaries.

And in return, we’d get to know so much about each other. It was, partly, I think, because we didn’t really know each other. We were just usernames on a platform, and if you lived in France or the Philippines or Denmark, there was a pretty big chance we would never meet in real life. So, there was no real risk in sharing, because we were not in each others’ lives.

((Fun fact: I actually did meet up with my LJfriend from Denmark, a couple of times even! … and once Lolita fashion came into my life, I met a lot of LJfriends from all over the world! whooo! Who said online friends aren’t real friends, eh… ;) ))

But what I’m trying to get at is, I think we would speak a lot more freely because we created our own narratives and nobody could fact check or butt in or create real life consequences. This is partly what allowed us to really talk about what was going on in our lives. For better or for worse, because it has also been proven that hiding behind some dramatic text post is far less constructive than real life face to face conversation. And I also felt that I would either only post either overly dramatic teen angsty posts or nothing at all – because I didn’t want to be too negative. Bon. We’re putting that behind us.

After some time those safe, heavily-curated-friends-list platforms died, and we moved to facebook and tumblr and instagram (while these are also heavily curated, they’re also pretty different from what the small blogging community used to be). At the same time I also tried to have a public blog because I liked the format and wanted to continue. Unfortunately, this public format was almost always a ghost town because I never quite knew how to balance what I could previously post on ‘friends locked’ places, and what was ‘appropriate’ for a wider audience. It’s not weird: they were completely different things and I treated them differently as such. I am also way too much of a perfectionist to share something before it’s ‘perfect’. (So many drafts. Sooo many!) Unfortunately this ultimately led to me not posting. But now that I’m also not on any private platforms anymore, I miss it.

SOOOooo. All this to say: I wanna come back. Regularly. For me. For the reason I started this whole thing. But I need to figure this out to do it properly.

The thing I really really struggle with is including people who aren’t me. I can’t read other people’s minds! I don’t know what is okay to share.

I want to share past things, but how can I do it without sharing too much about people who aren’t myself? And at the same time, if I filter or censor them out, what is the point? Should I not just share as it was, or not at all?

Yet not sharing at all makes me sad because I liked the adventures. Even if the people or events are not relevant anymore, ultimately I’m doing this to keep memories for myself. So it shouldn’t matter if I post 5 days or 5 years late. But the other people involved might not want to be involved 5 years late. Or maybe even in 5 years time I will regret having them in my memories. [Think about this. It’s weird. Memories are memories. But we want to change them to not be reminded of people who turned out not to be so great. Yes.] All of this circlejerking and never posting. Aaahh.

The logical solution is to not include other people in my blog. But… It’s my diary, and I am a social person, and I feel a diary is a reflection of my life and the people in it, so how honest of a diary is one where others are heavily edited out? I don’t know. I think this is a problem that we’ll have to tackle as we go along.

But to help future Vief and prevent her from having to edit out people’s faces, I think I’m going to take some lessons from past Vief and not share too much and just share ~my adventures~ with more of my personal experiences and my face and less other people’s faces and it’ll probably look super narcissistic but hey, whatever. My blog, my home, my rules… my face!

I feel like many people have had this figured out forever and it took me like ten years. Oh well.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hope this makes sense and I also hope you can bear with me while I figure things out and try to post more. Here’s to breathing some life into this ghost town!