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Happy ljversary to me!
According to the automated email LJ sent me, today is the 20th anniversary of me getting an LJ! Which means we've just missed the point when I've officially had an LJ for half my life, which is kind of mind-boggling. When I was a kid and preteen I always wanted to be the sort of person who kept a diary (or, at least, the sort of person who left one behind in a secret room, for a future kid to find and read to unravel a century-old mystery) but I could never sustain it, I'd make it a couple weeks and then lose steam. Somewhere are a bunch of notebooks with one or two youthful journal entries from me. And yet here I am, twenty years into adulthood, and I've journalled on average more than once a week that whole time!
The difference of course is you all - even when I don't want to write anything (and there have been months-long stretches when I haven't, usually a sign I am depressed enough that I think I don't deserve for anyone to hear what I have to say) - even then, I want to read about what the rest of you are up to, and that keeps me connected enough to come back.
And I just want to shout out to all the people on here who post regular daily-life diary entries even when it seems like nothing much is happening for long stretches. I don't comment on those kinds of posts as much as I should, but I read them, and you have, probably literally, saved my life. A post about three things that made you happy today or what your cats have been up to or how your boring job is going or what the birds in the park had to say or what you bought at the farmer's market for lunches this week is the best reminder that life keeps going and it's good that it keeps going when I need that reminder.
I always tell myself I should post more daily-life stuff and then I end up posting several thousand words about gen tag usage on AO3 or something instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Reading back that twenty years of my blogging probably wouldn't give most people much of an idea of what's actually happening in my offline life (although I often, consciously or subconsciously, stick in enough hints for *myself* that back reading is an experience, so there will not be some kind of retrospective today, sorry.) But actually the original reason I got an lj was planning to do more RL-based posts (the time when a classmate found my LJ and used that to figure out exactly where I would be on campus the next so they could corner me and confess their undying love largely cured me of that.) The final impetus was wanting somewhere I could publicly post "I am going to go wandering in the woods today" so that if I never wandered back out of the woods people would know where to look, but that has been less relevant to my future life than I ever expected. (I do go wandering in the woods at least a couple times a month lately, but it's the group text that gets the notifications and photos usually, sorry.)
That was early enough that I needed an invite, and invites were still pretty hard to come by. I didn't have much in the way of fandom friends I could ask for something like that and all my RL friends had run out months ago, so I ended up getting one via a friend of a friend of a friend. I haven't though about that in ages; all of those people moved on to Facebook years and years ago and I never did. But it's a reminder that for all that people talk about how the move to invite-only Discords is a step back, in the early days of LJ fandom it was at least as hard for people who didn't know anyone yet to jump in. You could, at least, read the discussion (when it wasn't locked) but you couldn't take part unless someone invited you in.
Anyway it is *also* very nearly the first Shellyversary already (I had to make her yearly vet appointment this week, she's going to be so scared, I don't think she ever had routine vet visits with her old people so her only association with them is the time around when she was at the shelter) and I haven't posted enough Shelly lately either, so here is a Shelly.
The difference of course is you all - even when I don't want to write anything (and there have been months-long stretches when I haven't, usually a sign I am depressed enough that I think I don't deserve for anyone to hear what I have to say) - even then, I want to read about what the rest of you are up to, and that keeps me connected enough to come back.
And I just want to shout out to all the people on here who post regular daily-life diary entries even when it seems like nothing much is happening for long stretches. I don't comment on those kinds of posts as much as I should, but I read them, and you have, probably literally, saved my life. A post about three things that made you happy today or what your cats have been up to or how your boring job is going or what the birds in the park had to say or what you bought at the farmer's market for lunches this week is the best reminder that life keeps going and it's good that it keeps going when I need that reminder.
I always tell myself I should post more daily-life stuff and then I end up posting several thousand words about gen tag usage on AO3 or something instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Reading back that twenty years of my blogging probably wouldn't give most people much of an idea of what's actually happening in my offline life (although I often, consciously or subconsciously, stick in enough hints for *myself* that back reading is an experience, so there will not be some kind of retrospective today, sorry.) But actually the original reason I got an lj was planning to do more RL-based posts (the time when a classmate found my LJ and used that to figure out exactly where I would be on campus the next so they could corner me and confess their undying love largely cured me of that.) The final impetus was wanting somewhere I could publicly post "I am going to go wandering in the woods today" so that if I never wandered back out of the woods people would know where to look, but that has been less relevant to my future life than I ever expected. (I do go wandering in the woods at least a couple times a month lately, but it's the group text that gets the notifications and photos usually, sorry.)
That was early enough that I needed an invite, and invites were still pretty hard to come by. I didn't have much in the way of fandom friends I could ask for something like that and all my RL friends had run out months ago, so I ended up getting one via a friend of a friend of a friend. I haven't though about that in ages; all of those people moved on to Facebook years and years ago and I never did. But it's a reminder that for all that people talk about how the move to invite-only Discords is a step back, in the early days of LJ fandom it was at least as hard for people who didn't know anyone yet to jump in. You could, at least, read the discussion (when it wasn't locked) but you couldn't take part unless someone invited you in.
Anyway it is *also* very nearly the first Shellyversary already (I had to make her yearly vet appointment this week, she's going to be so scared, I don't think she ever had routine vet visits with her old people so her only association with them is the time around when she was at the shelter) and I haven't posted enough Shelly lately either, so here is a Shelly.
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(Anonymous) 2023-07-23 12:28 pm (UTC)(link)