We love a good LiveJournal nostalgia moment!!!

Musings on personality as digital currency. Or something.

In 2005, all it took to elevate your LiveJournal aesthetic from Average Teen Diary to Certifiably Deep was sharing any number of quotes from author Chuck Palahniuk on your profile page. At least in my book, that was very much the case.

While such a beloved self-publishing hub as LiveJournal deserves its own newsletter entry wherein I candidly express my gratitude for it being the first to provide me with genuine internet community and wholesome support, for now, I'll just say my obsession with digital identity (and regular identity) began right around there.

Chuck Palahniuk added fuel to that charmingly adolescent fire, signaling a shift in my character from someone who saw the world in rose-colored glasses to someone who started leaving their pair at home before stepping out into the cold. His jarring way with words first fucked me all the way up when I read his book Invisible Monsters, and shortly thereafter, Diary. I was 14 or 15 at the time, and he quickly became one of my favorite authors. I'm sure I took advantage of every opportunity to be like, "Yeah that's cool but have you read his other work besides Fight Club?" Narrator: She did.

At this moment in time, I'm sure there could be some part of the internet that has canceled Mr. Palahniuk for one reason or another, as it admittedly has been a solid decade since I've last read his work or kept tabs on his career. But I will say, people don't always necessarily like the people who can figure out a way to really get into their heads. Chuck Palahniuk, as I recall fondly, has/had a real strength for doing exactly that.

For example, this quote from his 2003 novel Diary still lives under my skin and exerts a timeless quality to me:

"Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary."

When I was a teenager spilling my thoughts and writing my fragmented poems and talking to strangers on LiveJournal about my day so freely and without hesitation, this statement friggen SPOKE to me. It changed the way I approached my work. More specifically, it changed how I approached using LiveJournal, which at the time was my work. I didn't want my LiveJournal to be a diary; I wanted it to be something more important than that. If my LiveJournal was really a self-portrait, as Palahniuk’s work suggested it to be, I wanted it to be something deeper.

As such, the corner of the platform I had nestled into and made my own became split into the two categories: the Average Teen Diary users and the Certifiably Deep thinkers. I was eager to make sure I fit into the latter, even if that meant abandoning the part of myself that loved nothing more than being basic and taking things at face value like I had grown accustomed to. Being a Chuck Palahniuk fan meant entertaining chaos and asking questions without answers. His books stood out on my shelfs with a sharp rebellious contrast compared to the others. They were dark and messed up and tragic and nothing at all like my real life experiences. My parents would not have approved.

The Chuck Palahniuk enthusiasts I found online ranked high on my list. They, like Palahniuk himself, challenged my thinking and inspired me to broaden what was informing my perspective. Again, I was 15 years old with an internet connection, and all of this felt urgent, important and new. It felt like I was starting to find my people; a community I could confide in. LiveJournal served as a reminder that the world was much larger than my high school, and more complicated too.

In the real world at this time, I was also a new kid, having freshly moved from New York to Pennsylvania. Getting lost in Palahniuk's work for hours on end gave me both an outlet for my angst and an intellectual escape of sorts. I remember going back and forth in the comments with people I would never actually know. I corresponded daily with usernames I've since long forgotten. We'd trade our takes on Palahniuk's work and share our favorite lines. More importantly, we'd even take it a step further, becoming emboldened to write and share our own work. While it was mostly short stories, poetry and confessional blog posts, the feedback I'd get and the trust we all built had meant something. To this day, it still does. Naturally, I romanticize all of it.

Back then, that line in particular about "everything being a diary" got me thinking about my digital footprint for the first time. The inside of my brain was filled to the brim with the following: what am I contributing to the overall discourse of My Generation™, am I selecting the right fonts, does my customized layout reflect my personality accurately, what will someone who only knows me from this online space think of me if we met me in real life, isn’t it wild that none of this matters if the internet stopped being a thing. Real millennial hot girl shit, you know.

Unfortunately, as social media continues to wrap its greedy little claws around every facet of contemporary culture online—giving us STORIES on every single platform for crying out loud—it feels as though absolutely nothing has changed. It seems glaringly impossible to separate digital identity from regular identity, except these days we don't even get to customize our layouts. The sentiment remains. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.

All of this is a weird continuation of exactly where I was at 15 years ago, except I haven't broken the internet or beaten the algorithm despite spending all this time online, so what gives? Now, everything is curated. Everything is content. The timeline is unforgiving and ever-critical sans nuance and never forgets. Your mistakes, your messiness, your figuring-it-out-in-real-time could cost you. Or no one could care and just keep scrolling. Everything is a trap.

In the spirit of Palahniuk, one could argue personality is and has always been a digital currency of sorts. Something to master, something to control, something to use to your advantage. Even though it felt like I was figuring out who I was and "being myself" online, my personality quirks served me back then during my LiveJournal days, feeding my ego ever so nicely as I bared my soul with naïveté. Except today, this era of personality-as-content yields actual dollars and launches tangible careers and fuels imposter syndrome and makes the collective screentime skyrocket.

Social media is working exactly as it was designed to, and because of this, digital identity and personality has become a game, a skill, a formula, a test of its own strange making. These digital spaces feel less and less like the diary or self-portrait I originally assigned their meaning to, a la Palahniuk. And, with every update, it sinks us all deeper into contrived content oblivion because authenticity just doesn't sell the same. Because of this, that connection I had to LiveJournal as a platform simply can't be duplicated today. In those days, it was exactly like being a contestant on The Great British Bake Off - the experience alone was enough. And that's what I miss the most.