Ode to Livejournal

I feel a bit like a traitor. I've had my lj for nearly ten years. It got me through my first love, depression, the phase where I wrote pithy and ponderous prose of the shorter-than-short story vein to sort out that depression, all sorts of wild and whacky and stupid vestiges of desperate youth, the death of a friend, trips all over the world, the various lesser and greater heartbreaks of both a personal and professional nature, my discovery of dance, and everything that makes me the person I am today and many parts of myself that didn't endure to the present.

When I first began blogging, there was no facebook - not even myspace or (gasp) friendster. The vicarious thrill of anonymously peeking into another person's inner life was fresh and very raw. Even though many of my readers were the people I was blogging about (and many of the dramas in that well-documented life were inspired by this very fact), there seemed to be a safe anonymity - a fourth wall - that allowed all sorts of "secrets" to be not so secret. It gave me a voice before I found one in the world.

These days things have changed. I've changed a lot - I've found a voice over and over again; and after many experiences with the downsides of internet indelicacies I know better than to lay my soul spread-eagle on an increasingly accessible internet medium. While the locked-entry privacy settings were once appropriate, the fact that the only people who follow my lj now are generally not users themselves makes it useless. Blogging has changed - my "friends" for the most part have retreated into the all-inclusive folds of networking sites or simply drifted off to different sites. The blogs I follow are increasingly not lj blogs and so... here we are. The sites I read are frequently less personal and more topical, fixed on one little niche of an individual's life. My interests have changed - I'm not quite so fixated on myself in a vacuum. Where once I could spend hours gazing at my navel and compulsively documenting every contour of it (to the tune of three or four posts daily), I find myself less an less inclined to address the directly personal and more and more outwardly directed towards the world. In a lot of ways, I actually think these are ultimately more plebian and less interesting to read, but perhaps my earlier lj entires were just a little too interesting... too personal. I still get a little shock of adrenaline thinking about what very raw nerves I put out there for anyone to see. It felt brave, but in an oddly cowardly version of it. So, here I am starting over. Obsessing still, but differently. Or perhaps not. You be the judge.