Friends-locked

A paean for Livejournal and the early 2000s internet

20 year old JJ, back when I was living in London, smoking cigarettes (don’t do this, kids), and chemically straightening my hair in an attempt to fit in with the trends of 2005. You can see how much my roots are protesting this by developing a life of their own.

I know I am au courant with the Youths™ when I start waxing rhapsodic about the early 2000s.

I know I am Old when it’s not the fashion nor the scene I’m nostalgic for, but Livejournal.

Some of y’all might have seen a half-baked essay idea from me a few weeks ago, back when my bipolar meds were being tweaked and I was in the middle of depression. I had called it A paean for Livejournal, and I had intended on exploring what coming of age on the internet was like twenty years ago vs. what I imagine it must be like today. I scheduled it, then forgot I hadn’t finished it, and before I knew it, it was winging its way to your inboxes. Oops. Sorry about that.

Anyway, now that a little time has passed, I’ve changed my mind about what I really wanted to talk about in that Livejournal essay. I still want to explore a little about what coming of age on the internet was like back then — and I probably will in a future piece — but what I want to talk about today is the matryoshka doll of the self. The selves I share with the public, with my audience, with my readers, with my fans, with my friends, with my family, and myself.

Because I’m worried I’ve lost a few dolls along the way.

---

I know I am au courant with the Youths™ when I tend to find the user base of millennial social media apps incredibly cringe. However, I definitely know I am Old because I worry about the effect social media is having on…well, everyone. And by everyone, I mean me.

Earlier this year, I went on something of a social media detox in an effort to rediscover joy. It helped in many aspects, but that resolution to stay offline is harder to keep the closer I get to publication day for my next book. Part of it is because the only socialization I have most days is online; I live in a medium-ish town in western North Carolina without a lot of real life friends close by.¹ For someone who grew up in large, ethnically diverse cities like Los Angeles and New York City, this sort of existence is incredibly painful and lonely. I miss having Korean food in town. I miss variety. I miss having a life full of novelty and new experiences, and because I don’t have that where I live, I try to find it vicariously through social media.

But living vicariously online and living in real life are two different things, yet I find it harder and harder these days to hold that boundary. Everyone online is content to be consumed, including my presence and the presence of others. I forget, sometimes, that what I wanted to use social media for is connection, not consumption, but I can’t stop consuming. It’s subtraction stew from The Phantom Tollbooth, the more I eat, the hungrier I get. I consume and consume and consume in the hopes that through consumption will come connection, even though I know it’s futile. It’s futile because it’s all sterile.

There is nothing of me online.

My Instagram feed is incredibly aesthetic, and incredibly empty. My TikTok is chaotic without context. These are curated photos and videos of my books, my face, my life. I observe my own presence through the eyes of a consumer, I think only about what a general public would want from an author — what I want to see from an author. I think about the ways I would have loathed to think of my favorite authors as people as a teenager, to have too much reality intrude on the fantasy worlds of their novels, and keep myself distant.

And yet, ever since I was young, I wrote to make myself understood. To connect. My artistic wound is a fear of being lost in translation, and so I speak and write and draw and create to make my self comprehensible. Tangible. Manifest. But being social media prompts me to the do the opposite, to make myself consumable, untouchable, dehumanized. I am never more conscious how much of my self is a performance than when I am scrolling through social media, and never more afraid that I am so much performance, I can no longer real.

---

As I’ve said before in that now-deleted, half-baked essay, the internet was local when I was growing up.

Communities actually existed back then, little clubs and silos of common interests. More than that, there were myriad places to spend time with your little nerdy interest clubs — personal websites and forums hosted by individuals, which felt far more akin to going to someone’s house and hanging out, enjoying the thing you loved together. Some of my best and oldest friends were made on these forums and personal websites, the way some of my best and oldest friends were made through the proximity of childhood.

And then came Livejournal.

Back in the early 2000s, Livejournal functioned as something similar to a social network-cum-blog — as a place where you could pour your most intimate thoughts on your personal profile and participate in community activities at the same time. It felt like a neighborhood, or perhaps like college, with our own private spaces and semi-public areas where we could socialize, flirt, peacock, and play around. We still had the sense of our selves as selves, not presences, although awareness of a public persona was starting to develop.

But back then it was easier to hold those boundaries because Livejournal had levels of privacy. You could sort your Friends — Friends, not followers, or worse, following — into different lists, and you could share different content to each group. For my fandom Friends I had one persona, and for my personal Friends I had another. And there was a difference too, between the content I made public, and the content I made Friends-locked. In some sense, my public self was the most distant from the true me, the furthest doll from the innermost figure in the matryoshka doll of the self.

Every day I wish social media had this function.

Because I could use some separation between a private, public, and professional self.

Some social media apps pay lip service to this function — Twitter used to have Circles, and Instagram has Close Friends, but for the most part, you can either have a public or private account, and if you need anything in between, you can only have one. The problem with being chronically online is witnessing the chronic flattening of the self into an algorithmically-pleasing shape — uncomplicated, uncomplex, unhuman. Either this or that. A binary.

I do not like binaries of any kind.

---

All this to say…there are so many things I want to say, to share to people I don’t see every day. To people beyond the edges of my private group texts, the people with whom I want to connect and not perform. To be more candid about my feelings, to be human and whole and messy. I wish there were a way to do this without putting up a paywall, but such is the way of late stage capitalism.

So going forward, I will be putting more personal, more vulnerable posts behind the paywall in a section called Friends-locked. I won’t be writing them to do anything but connect, but neither will I go seeking for an audience. In the matryoshka doll of the self that goes from core to friends and fans to readers to audience to public, my friends-locked posts will for my family, friends, and fans. For the people with whom I want to connect, and who I trust won’t consume me.

Here’s to the future.

사랑해,

1.

Lemon

is my closest friend, both physically and emotionally, and even then she lives over a half-hour of highway driving away.