When the Internet Was Weird: A Reflection on My Y2K Blogging Start
I didn't intend to get this deep, but here we are.
It’s 2000, and I’m sitting in yearbook class, designing layouts in PageMaker for our end-of-year publication. What a time to be alive, to be a teenager surrounded by the best music, the best fashion, and a complete lack of social media. You’ll never convince me it wasn’t the best era to be a kid. I was truly living my best version of Rory Gilmore’s life.
During the mouse clicks and drag-and-drops, a whole world of blogging was quietly unfolding in front of me. The internet was fresh and still made noise when you connected to it during these times. It was clunky and 8-bit, and it was music to my juvenile ears.
A yearbook co-conspirator invited me to LiveJournal, and it sounds silly, but I think it changed my life. See, I grew up in an insanely conservative home, raised by a grandmother who regularly rifled through my backpack and listened in on every phone call just to make sure I wasn’t falling into the wrong crowd or being influenced by the Devil. I remember making my account on the spot and feeling a cool sweat gather at the back of my neck, because I knew that if my grandmother ever found out I had a LiveJournal, I’d probably never see daylight again. But at the same time, I rarely saw the light of day because under her rule, no friends stayed the night and I certainly didnt sleepover at their houses, there were no weekend outtings to the mall, I was a teenage prisoner in our singlewide trailer. There was no convincing her that her single wide thinking was wrong, thats just how it was.
Anyway, back to it, when I clicked on that publish button, oh my god, there was this exhilarating rush of freedom that I had never felt before.
And if you’re wondering, yes, eventually she found out. But we’ll talk about that another time.
LiveJournal gave me access to other weirdos who were just like me. As I got older and started intentionally creating distance from my family, I always came back to blogging. I loved it. I mean, I love it. I’m here, aren’t I?
Back then, LiveJournal was just a silly little brain space, nothing special, nothing profound. It was just a corner of the digital dial-up where I could talk about movies, television shows, and clothes (that I technically wasn’t allowed to see, watch, wear or even like) with people who liked the same stuff I did. Eventually, I graduated to Google’s Blogger platform and lived there for almost two decades, writing about my silly little outfits and daily life. Again, nothing profound.
Now, after about thirteen years, I’m feeling the itch to document again. I don’t see myself doing outfit posts (not like I used to, anyway), but in today’s world, a space where it’s okay to be an oddball feels like something we desperately need. Something I desperately need.
Lately, I’ve been revisiting the crafts and art forms of my youth, almost all of them analog. While I do see the slight hypocrisy of preaching the analog gospel on a digital platform, who cares, right? This world and society we’ve created is all make-believe anyway. Do what you want. Like what you like. Don’t let anyone or anything stop you from being the version of yourself that you’ve always wanted to be.
That’s what I’m trying to do, anyway.
I want to find fellow freaks, geeks, wierdos and mavens. If you are out there - HEAR MY CALL! Forever ago, blogging opened a door for me that showed me that my unhappiness was an institution and not that I was bad, or wrong or corrupt, but that instead, I was being forced to fit a mold made for me by someone who inherently hated me.
Blogging gave me safe passage to finding out that I was actually not alone and that I was in fact normal, and that there was a lot more out there, that the world had more possibilities than what I saw in my IRL views. Maybe this version of blogging won’t unlock some magical doorway into a new, untapped version of my “self,” and maybe it ends up being a place where I just post pictures from my garden, chat about books and share messy spreads from my sketchbook. Maybe it’s just a silly little blog and no one reads it. I think that’s okay.
So, for my very first post here, if the eyes reading over this post belong to another navigator looking for another oddball, I’ll leave you with this:
Enjoy the ride. We only get to live this version of life once, so let’s make it a fun one. You’re actually kind of perfect.
You know what? I DO think this blog could unlock some magical doorway into a new, untapped version of you :^P