a posthumous record of accounts

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 22:05:18 GMT

I feel like I have to write something to mark this day. One day I'll come back to this journal and I'll want to really remember everything that lead to this sort-of repository of my personal history.

I deleted my LJ today. I backed up all my entries and comments to my dreamwidth account before I did it. The recent decisions by LJ's Russian owners to limit free speech on their site goes against everything I believe and the core reason why that service existed in the first place.

I don't remember the year I started on LJ. My junior high days were spent on DeadJournal, since I didn't get an LJ access code till years later. In high school I spent a lot of time on LJ communities for fanfiction (wrote a few myself). My first, all-consuming fandom was the House MD fandom (of all things). I was a Hilson shipper and vehemently anti-Huddy (I was young, forgive me). During this time I also discovered my favorite band, the Killers, and was part of a lot of fan communities -- the one I spent the most time on being CAPS_THEKILLERS. I made some of my greatest friendships on that community and I still follow several of my friends from there when we migrated to tumblr.

Then the year after I started college, 2009, a little reboot movie called Star Trek happened. I've been a trekkie ever since and the community ONTD_STARTREK was where I cultivated several of my closest friendships. There was a thread for local meetups to go see the movie and I became part of a small, tight-nit group that saw that damn movie 5+ times together, before we all realized we had other shared interests and can just do other things! While I've lost contact with one person from that group, I'm still close friends with 3 of the women I met and still see/talk to them regularly.

What I'm trying to put down here is not an accurate, date-by-date account of my time on LJ, but the overall impact of the years I spent on that platform. It wounds me that it's become what it is, when it had such a special place in my upbringing. I'm 28 years old now. I grew up on the Internet. During my high school years I had stronger connections with those online friends than I did with my school friends. I was struggling and I went to LJ for connection -- and I found it.

I think connection has always been at the center of everything I've wanted out of my life. I've wanted connection in my interpersonal relationships; connection with the world; and to understand the connections we cultivate. When I started my LJ I never imagined I'd one day work at a university as a research coordinator, going into a masters program on human development. I had no clear idea of my future; I was struggling enough with the day to day most of the time, that I couldn't fathom what my future would hold.

I still don't have a clear view of the future. Oh, I have plans, but I'm old enough now to know the future will always look different than how we envisioned it. And, in a lot of ways, the past looks different than how we remember it. This blog is now a testament to that. I always remember my adolescence with a less-than-rosy lens, but going back through these entries I find that the days were more rosy than not; that my hopes and dreams weren't so dissimilar from the reality I find myself in now; that the same people I loved and lost didn't stay lost forever; and that maybe I was a little bit smarter, and a little bit stronger than I gave myself credit for.

We are not always the sum of our past experiences. We exist in the moment. I am the person chronologged in this journal here, but that person is also strange to me now. I keep this journal as a reminder that, to me, where I came from was never an indicator of where I was going.

Nicole aka Niffer aka karmadownurgun
Thursday, April 13th, 2017

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a posthumous record of accounts