The Little LiveJournal That Could: Embarrassing Wonders Of Growing Up Online
Gather ‘round, children. We have some tales to tell. The year was 2002 and I was a freshman in an all-girls, private Catholic high school in Dallas, Texas. My social landscape looked rather bleak. With young women who had been raised mostly conservative, definitely religious and with some serious wealth, I felt alienated.
Moreover, I didn’t even want to acclimate. Young women who were being molded for a distinct path surrounded me. I saw our shared future and it included a very nice Southern sorority with a very pleasant young man who would quite politely ask for my hand in marriage after our completely cordial courtship throughout our undergraduate degree. We would have very adorable children, live in an unnecessarily large suburban home and very much enjoy our SUVSs and Labrador dogs. If you think I’m kidding, know that at this particular private school’s graduation ceremony, you were required to wear a wide-brimmed white hat and curtsey while holding a bouquet of roses as your name was called.
This was some serious nonsense and I was having none of it. While this would manifest in almost being kicked out of said private school, stabbing myself with my safety pin earrings and some abhorrent hair colors, my first foray into social subversion came from within the niche corners of the Internet.
One day in class, I noticed a classmate (who would later develop several popular blogs) using her laptop to code, instead of diligently tapping out history notes. Several lines of HTML later and up popped her blog, her LiveJournal. It was customized within an inch of its life. I mean, there was animation all over this thing. Images of anime characters and Harajuku Lolita fashion danced across the screen, interspersed with deeply personal blog posts discussing everything from her current relationship to what her last Friday night entailed.
Like any good child who watched “Harriet the Spy” in the late 1990s, I found myself with the distinct proclivity to unabashedly spy on people from an early age. LiveJournal was like spying except I didn’t have to do any work; all the voyeurism was laid out for me. Details were ripe for the picking. And, even better, there was a whole network of users who were all doing the same thing: spilling their life’s intimate moments online.
People will try to argue that other competitive sites like Xanga were equally as enjoyable. Those people are lying; LJ was where the proverbial “it” and very literally I was at.
I was hooked immediately. I spilled everything (once again, everything) online. I had friends who I knew in real life who would corroborate with me on LiveJournal. Consider this the precursor to friendly Instagram FOMO, except that your BFF was writing a tome about your Saturday together. LiveJournal incorporated images fine but you were looking for something meatier and probably more dramatic that just an early 2000s selfie. No, no. This needed to be an essay about the distinctly profound film you just saw in your local independent theater. Its title? “Crash.”
LiveJournal was, and is, a lesson in pretentious narcissism. It was navel gazing at its best. Let’s look at some Caitlin Greenwood early teen highlights.
Here, as you can see, we have some *kEwL* poetry about growing up, dying and also snakes. Maybe I had just gone to the zoo.
Conor Oberst was the patron saint of LiveJournal. But also no one understood him as well as I did. Obviously.
Aw, baby Caitlin; it’s okay. Look at us now! We totally still get to write on the Internet.
The litany continues from 2002 until 2006 with various crowd sourcing from my friends about what they would say at my funeral (classy), and then coded messages to and from boys who I was perennially in love with. You know. The usual. I have spared you all the photos that show me in various states of sad (actually sad, sad in good lighting, sad but please also look at this new haircut) but know that they exist and without much work, you could find them.
To be a teenager is in many ways just embarrassing. To be a teenager on LiveJournal was to chronicle each moment of that embarrassing period in grandiose, overwrought detail. And I fucking loved every shameful second of it.
