LJ Thoughts

[oyceter]

Sparked because today is my "categorize everything into Memories" day. Some day I shall adopt tags... aka, a) when I figure out how to duplicate my layout in S2 b) when tags are not limited to 100 entries and c) when tags and memories are mutually inclusive systems, so if you tag something, it appears in Memories, and vice versa.

Anyhow, it's rather interesting, because I enjoy going through everything I've written every month and sorting it out. I mean, some of it is a little embarrassing, but it's interesting. Not just from a depression standpoint, in which I am striving to notice my moods and assorted other mental temperature taking, but just seeing what I wrote and how I said it, how happy I was a certain weekend and how down feeling I was on another. I've got a pretty bad memory, and so LJ is a bit like my second brain.. it helps somewhat recapture the feeling of the moment.

So it's always particularly interesting when I know people who do go through their LJs and are embarrassed by previous entries to the point of deleting them. I suppose I am embarrassed by mine at times, especially since I tend to write with a great deal of run-ons, parentheticals and exclamation points, but another part of me is rather happy for the exclamation-point-happy me who posted two weeks ago, because I don't feel the same level of sheer joy today (not that I am sad, because I am calm and relaxed, but I am definitely not leaking exuberance out of the pores. Alas, I fear I am obnoxiously cheerful). I think part of me rather recoils at the thought of deleting LJ entries. This is probably because I've been keeping various notebooks of things that I find interesting my entire life -- poems, names, story ideas, movies I've seen, etc. I like lists. I like organizing things and having them all there, filed and ready for access. When I got a computer, I'd have my notebooks and Word docs or Excel files or whatnot. I'm still sad that I never managed to rescue all of them when our old computer died, and now I've lost the notebooks as well. It is sometimes painful reading old story tidbits and how bad they are, or my old diaries, in which I write that I feel so old but I sound so young (I shall snicker at this later on and think of how young I sound here too), but it's a bit of a fond painfulness, if that makes any sense. I know I wouldn't be me today without going through those spots.

I don't remember if I felt like this while depressed, but I suspect I wasn't the purging-entries sort, because I still liked rereading, and I don't think I've deleted an entry yet.

Plus, it's rather interesting sort of seeing myself the way other people on LJ are getting to know me, via text on the internet and snapshots of my life. I always wonder what people end of thinking of me, if the me on LJ resembles the me in RL and how far apart the two are. It's very strange, now that I've met LJ people in real life... the first moment is almost always one of shock, in which they don't quite fit my mental picture (aka, Yoon was not actually a crow. Amazing.) And then, I can start seeing resemblances in their conversational voice and their LJ voice, a family resemblance of sorts, and then, sometimes, I can't read their LJs without hearing their voices.

On the opposite side, when I read the LJs of friends that I know in RL, it's always a little strange as well because I feel they are saying things they wouldn't necessary say right out to me, or that I am somehow getting a more intimate picture of what's going on in their heads.

Comments

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

*wry grin* I think all the moving I've done in my life has made purging/deleting savagely satisfying. Which may also be related to my writing--the impulse to cut rather than to add, even though what's warranted overall is the latter. (Of course, there are bits and pieces that ought to be cut, but I mean cutting.)

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

I don't think I could delete my old entries - even though I might well be embarrased of them. It just feels unfair, you know?

Besides, I am the person who carries the notebooks and silly stuff written years ago along with me across the world, so i feel the same as you do.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

I don't delete entries, whenever I do an infrequent Memories sweep (with four years of entries, most of them uncategorized, it's taken me a long time to catch up). I have, however, locked a *lot* of them down privately, or when I added them to Memories, made them private so they're less easy to find.

To me, the person who was writing in this journal in 2001 and 2002 was often a crazy nutjob, and doing my growing up on the internet has been embarrassingly public at times.

[oyceter]

That makes sense!

It's sort of funny, because the same moving experiences in my life have caused me to go the complete opposite way, in which I turn into a total packrat who can't bear to throw anything away. I think maybe it's because I was in one place for eight years, and then another for eight years, so while I moved from one country to another and back to another, the first two moves were in one place for a long time, in the same house and everything. So things tend to accumulate ;). It drove me absolutely nuts when I had to change dorm rooms every year in college and I had to keep packing and unpacking and oh my god, so depressing! I hate packing.

[oyceter]

Hee, yes. My mom once almost threw away all my old notebooks, and when she told me, I made such a fit that she actually ended up going down to the recycling bin and digging them all out afterward. I felt sort of bad about that, but not as bad as I would have felt if she had actually thrown all of them away! The idea still gives me shudders.

[oyceter]

*nods* That's really interesting! I wonder if I will keep my LJ for this long, and if I'll feel like locking down a whole bunch of things several years down the line, particularly the posts made while depressed.

[thinkum]

It would never occur to me to delete entries; they're each part of who I am today, regardless of whether or not re-reading them makes me cringe.

Sometimes I feel like LJ is a separate (but equally valid!) reality, running parallel to our "real lives"...

[oyceter]

Yeah, sometimes I do too! Although nowadays it is more integrated into RL, given that my roommate and I met via LJ and that we both chatter on about LJ and the like.