Introspective Meander #573
Oct. 17th, 2002 07:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyspriteI was talking about livejournal with a friend last night, and said friend mentioned the appeal of a chance to be witty. A good thing, I thought, and a valid reason to join this kind of a forum, but it started me thinking. And somewhere in the twisted hopscotch games of my mind, it eventually led me to wonder about why I'm here, and why I originally started keeping an online journal.
I had promised myself from the start that this journal was for myself, not for any real or imagined audience, and that I would always write honestly and... well, *real*-ly, for lack of a better word. No playing to the audience, no striving to insert false wit to amuse the readers and give them an inflated image of my own cool. Have I managed to do that? Is it even possible, or does the awareness of readers change the nature of what I say?
I've kept journals before, and what I write now is completely different from what I wrote before. Then again, I'm a completely different person. When I was in high school and college, I wrote to help myself survive the bad times. When the pain was too much, I wrote to put those feelings outside myself, somewhere that I could see them and deal with them on my own terms before they would overflow and devour me. I wrote about good things, too, but I did so to prove to myself that they really happened, that I didn't make them up in a fit of desperation. And everything I wrote was, in some way, for me-as-I-am-now - a way to remind myself of who I was and where I came from and how I used to work.
Those diaries were for me and me alone - I have stacks upon stacks of one-subject spiral bound notebooks filled with bits of my heart and soul that noone else has ever seen, and noone else will ever see. And for years in between, I didn't keep a diary at all. Until I found this.
When I discovered livejournal, I didn't know if it would work for me. I mostly hopped on here to keep track of what other friends wrote. But somehow, as soon as I sat down in front of the keyboard, words started pouring out again. But I'm not trying to carry myself through bad times anymore. I'm still writing to get the words out of my head and into someplace where they can have an existence of their own, and where I can think about them and myself and how they relate, and to leave a portrait for future-me about who and what I am now, but there's not the sense of writing as pain-relief that there was before.
Looking at what I've said, I guess that this is still *my* journal. I suppose knowing that other people read it does color what I say to some extent, but if someone told me tomorrow that noone else would ever read another word, I'd still keep writing. It's not as clever as it could be, and maybe I owe an apology to the audience for that - this will never be the Daily Becky News, or Becky's Wacky Entertainment Spot.... but on the other hand, maybe not. If you know me well enough to be reading this, you probably wouldn't expect that to begin with. It's just my mind, put into words. Nothing more, nothing less.
I had promised myself from the start that this journal was for myself, not for any real or imagined audience, and that I would always write honestly and... well, *real*-ly, for lack of a better word. No playing to the audience, no striving to insert false wit to amuse the readers and give them an inflated image of my own cool. Have I managed to do that? Is it even possible, or does the awareness of readers change the nature of what I say?
I've kept journals before, and what I write now is completely different from what I wrote before. Then again, I'm a completely different person. When I was in high school and college, I wrote to help myself survive the bad times. When the pain was too much, I wrote to put those feelings outside myself, somewhere that I could see them and deal with them on my own terms before they would overflow and devour me. I wrote about good things, too, but I did so to prove to myself that they really happened, that I didn't make them up in a fit of desperation. And everything I wrote was, in some way, for me-as-I-am-now - a way to remind myself of who I was and where I came from and how I used to work.
Those diaries were for me and me alone - I have stacks upon stacks of one-subject spiral bound notebooks filled with bits of my heart and soul that noone else has ever seen, and noone else will ever see. And for years in between, I didn't keep a diary at all. Until I found this.
When I discovered livejournal, I didn't know if it would work for me. I mostly hopped on here to keep track of what other friends wrote. But somehow, as soon as I sat down in front of the keyboard, words started pouring out again. But I'm not trying to carry myself through bad times anymore. I'm still writing to get the words out of my head and into someplace where they can have an existence of their own, and where I can think about them and myself and how they relate, and to leave a portrait for future-me about who and what I am now, but there's not the sense of writing as pain-relief that there was before.
Looking at what I've said, I guess that this is still *my* journal. I suppose knowing that other people read it does color what I say to some extent, but if someone told me tomorrow that noone else would ever read another word, I'd still keep writing. It's not as clever as it could be, and maybe I owe an apology to the audience for that - this will never be the Daily Becky News, or Becky's Wacky Entertainment Spot.... but on the other hand, maybe not. If you know me well enough to be reading this, you probably wouldn't expect that to begin with. It's just my mind, put into words. Nothing more, nothing less.
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no subject
Date: 2002-10-17 07:33 am (UTC)Beyond that, it's a matter of scratching your own itches. For me, the wit thing is less a constraint than an opportunity -- I don't generally get enough chance to flex those particular muscles. (And they are mental muscles, that atrophy if you don't use them enough.) But that's not everyone's cup'o'ramen...
no subject
Date: 2002-10-17 09:45 am (UTC)Oh, I understand - and I'm sorry if it came across as at all critical - that's not what I meant; it was just something that made me think, more a starting point than the idea itself (if that makes any sense). I'm not a particularly witty soul, so I need to have something else to babble about in here....
no subject
Date: 2002-10-17 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-10-17 07:22 pm (UTC)