Substack is the new Live Journal
Musings on the Old Internet, Being h*rny on main, and documenting a life. Last essay of the year, folks!
For the ultimate reading experience of this essay, I’ve curated a playlist of tunes from my LiveJournal days that you can listen to here, called The LiveJournal Era. Enjoy!
I miss LiveJournal.
I’ve spent literally my entire life on the Internet, primarily for the purpose of writing words in different places, leaving them like prepper stashes all over the World Wide Web. The first website I ever coded myself (in Microsoft Word, no less) was hosted on Geocities. I had a collection of Extremely Melancholy teenage poems and flash fiction stories ‘hosted’ on that four-page website. The time I wasn’t spending perfecting my Geocities personal page was spent on early message boards, cruising for (cyber) sex despite not knowing that was what I was doing at the time.
Yahoo message boards were particularly helpful in finding people to be early Internet horny with so I’d A/S/L my way into some truly grotesque mimicry of what I thought people who were having sex sounded like.
In a limited contact life, where I was kept isolated from the larger world around me, the Internet helped me to learn some semblance of social skills.
I was an intensely lonely teenager. Abuse turns you inside out and makes it difficult to trust other human beings, especially when you are being explicitly told by your abuser that people outside of your home were absolutely not to be trusted, under no circumstance. I was told, further, that not only could other people not be trusted, but that they were actively seeking to hurt and harm me and the best way to avoid that harm was to avoid people.
My abuser, my mother, was incapable of maintaining friendships.
She was severely paranoid about anyone who wasn’t someone we shared DNA with. Her primary method of building relationships was through manipulation: any bond built on having your mind and emotions hijacked and fucked with by another person against your will (and without your consent or understanding) is not a relationship anyone wants to be in, so friends left often. That, of course, left her lonely and in that loneliness, she wanted me to also navigate similar isolation, so she had someone to lament to about constantly being left behind. That little narrative haunted my capacity to build healthy relationships for a long time and I didn’t process well being “left behind” by others.
A simple but momentarily painful fact of life is that relationships end, eventually.
Instead, I was taught that this fact was really a specific unfairness I was cursed with because my abuser felt cursed by the departure of people who woke up to her manipulations.
On the Internet, I began to learn that relationships could also be temporary and transactional, especially when it came to cruising. I learned that some interactions, some relationships, were predicated on their temporariness and so I sunk deeper into an increasingly online life.
We talk a lot, on the Internet, about general horniness.
Someone, somewhere on the internet, right now is horny on main, as we like to say. Mainly, our collective horniness is abstracted: as a euphemism, I could wake up one day and get on Twitter to talk about how I’m horny for the seven academic texts I just ordered at half off and someone would like said tweet and likely share how horny they are about the academic texts they also just purchased at half off.
As a teen who was admittedly Extremely Horny All The Time, no one ever talks about how complicated it is to feel horny but not have the language for what you are feeling! I wasn’t given any literal language about my changing body as a teenager. There was a moment in time where I was absolutely certain I’d remain a child, suspended in animation, for the rest of my life and then puberty kicked in and I recognized I would have no choice but to become a teenager and then, later, an “adult”.
I often felt something I couldn’t place with language that I also knew was related to the abuse I was experiencing but I didn’t have language for that, either.
There are lots of signs that a child — teenage or younger — is experiencing childhood sexual abuse.
One of those signs is an increase of non-age appropriate interest in sex, or in laymen’s terms, being horny all! the! time! I had a very vague sense of what sex was. For starters, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV or movies my mother hadn’t first screened to make sure I wasn’t exposed to any sex scenes. When TV or movies couldn’t be screened prior to my consumption, like at the movie theatre for a movie that had just been released, I was to shut my eyes and cover my ears with my hands until I was told it was safe for me to look at the screen again.
At thirty-two years old, I still get uncomfortable watching sex on the screen. It’s a lifelong taboo I’m going to spend the rest of my life working through.
It took me picking up a Seventeen magazine while waiting in line at Publix to stumble upon a column, where one sixteen years old wrote in because of a “strange sensation of wetness” she had whenever she kissed her boyfriend, to read the words ‘aroused’ and ‘horny’ to fully understand something that had been occurring to me, sans boyfriend for a while. I suddenly had language I desperately needed for a state of feeling I hadn’t understood prior, so I went in search of some clarity, starting first on a message board that included some version of ‘ 18+ Young and Horny’.
Twelve and thirteen were really hard ages for me, cruising for digital sex on message boards aside.
For a period of time, I was a latchkey kid as both of my parents were working and typically wouldn’t arrive from work until the early evening. That meant, when I got home from school around 3:30, I was to make sure my brother and I completed any homework we were assigned, had something to eat, and checked in with my aunt who lived a few units away from us.
It also gave me unsupervised Internet time for a few glorious hours.
The most fun I had on the Internet was cruising as a pre-teen.
Assuming different identities to talk dirty with strangers online was pretty exhilarating. I was also doing it right under the nose of my abuser who weaved a tale of her omnipotence as though she were to be feared more than God itself. She never found out about my cruising habit, one of a few small victories against my Goliath.
Cybering became something I got good at because I was dealing in language and because this was the early, early Internet, there was never the expectation of having to share photographs which made cruising even easier. I was whoever I chose to be in those transactional exchanges.
I learned to pick ‘reasonable’ ages to claim — never over nineteen but never my actual age of twelve or thirteen. Nineteen and sixteen seemed to be the ages that got me the most private messaging offers. I posed as male actually quite often to cruise. I had a few characters I’d been developing for short stories I never ended up writing because I had to protect those personas for my chat activities.
As a boy, it seemed helpful to be a fully fleshed-out human being. As a girl, the less of a person I seemed to be, the better.
Gay cybersex was the most fun and engaging. If I were Malik, for instance, who was really into hardcore and industrial music, who liked boys and girls but was too scared to tell his current crush, Michael — a redhead with tomato soup freckles dappling his face — the older men I spoke to seemed to really enjoy glimpses of Malik’s life as a sophomore in high school before jumping into some real wild, exploratory cybersex.
Straight cybersex was always to the point and the most transactional of my interactions on message boards. If I was pretending to be Lisa, who was sixteen and a cheerleader, no one really cared to hear about my life in school. The moment I mentioned I was a cheerleader, someone was asking me if I was wearing my cheerleading uniform and the cybering would commence immediately.
Naturally, being the good Christian child I was being programmed into being, I had moments of intense, crippling guilt about my behaviors online. I lamented about this occasionally in my journal, wishing I wasn’t feeling these intense desires to engage in inappropriate talk with strangers on the internet, but cruising for digital sex was where I began to learn a sense of autonomy, and in my increasingly controlled existence, I craved the autonomy I got from cruising more than alleviating the horniness that propelled me towards cruising.
When MSN and Yahoo Messengers appeared on the scene, it was a total and complete wrap for me: I created multiple email accounts for a roster of five personas I used for cruising.
On Yahoo, I created some saucy screen name featuring the word peaches and smiles and a random configuration of numbers, I started creeping in the message boards for lesbian and bisexual women, looking for potential rooms to pick up people in. I was most hesitant and worried about getting caught in on these boards. It wouldn’t register with me until many years later that my cruising boards for gay men had something to do with the tension I was feeling around my assigned female gender not being actually correct, but you know, one identity crisis at a time.
Being queer was the most serious identity crisis I was grappling with because it was tied up in the current culture war being crusaded by fascist Evangelical Christians in Florida.
The gay conversion camps were cropping up by the minute and the cult I was currently apart of was making it their mission to persecute and indict queer people just about every other sermon I was forced to hear. My cruising turned into simply wanting to connect with other queer femmes, in hopes that someone could tell me I’d have a future where I didn’t end up being tossed into a conversion camp, so I began searching for community instead of sex.
A woman I tried to pick up, but who figured out pretty quickly I wasn’t nineteen years old nor had I any experience with sex outside of talking to men about what I imagined sex was like with them, clocked me and changed my life. This woman asked me how old I really was less than two minutes into flirting.
She was in her late fifties and told me I shouldn’t be talking to adults, especially about sex, on the Internet. She warned me that all manner of things could happen to me without my realizing it, but she also sympathized with my need to connect with community. She lamented with me over the conversion camps and the scary war Evangelicals were waging against people like us.
Like us.
A sheen of recognition poured over me. She told me that I would have plenty of time to meet other people my age that I could flirt with, and maybe even date if I wanted to try that out, but that I should wait a little bit and not seek that sort of attention from adults. She apologized to me for coming off initially as predatory and reminded me again, adults and children were not supposed to be engaged in sexual relationships of any kind, even if it was “just” talking about sex on the internet. Then she told me about that website where I could meet other kids like me, a place where I could make friends while I began exploring my identity in a healthy way.
I was a teary, snotty mess by the time I told her thank you and she ended our chat.
I deleted my MSN and Yahoo accounts and started spending time on the website she recommended, Outminds, instead. I did make one close friend, Christopher, thanks to Outminds. Chris told me about a few other communities for queer and questioning teens on a platform called LiveJournal.
By the time I was a sophomore in high school, back in public school after three years of attending a Christian preparatory school, I’d finally made some friends in my Japanese and English classes. To my surprise, we all had LiveJournals so we started following each other. I then learned I wasn’t the only queer kid trying to figure out what the fuck that meant and I wasn’t the only abused kid, either.
Even if that meant I knew these things by reading the subtext of very emo, very coded posts but I learned, quickly and most importantly, everyone around me was human, too: Some of us had really difficult relationships with our mothers. Some of us were navigating food insecurity. Some of us were experimenting with drugs and sex. Some of us were being neglected. Mostly, none of us really knew what we were supposed to be doing or feeling or thinking at any given time and we found solace in our collective confusion.
I ‘friended’ people who would have never been friends with me had it not been for my curated online LJ persona — something I had some practice with from my earlier days of cruising under different assumed identities. I could peer into the life of a rich kid in Chicago, living in a million dollar home in Lincoln Park (I so envied the amount of space this girl had to make photographs with expensive cameras she got every few months, but her parents were never around) or I could follow the adventures of a kid recently moved from the hills of West Virginia to Atlanta, who fell in love with snap music (we traded a lot of Southern Rap with each other).
Thanks to LiveJournal, I watched one of my smartest friends start to blossom into a teacher — he often posted a word of the day, helping us all to build our vocabularies. He’s a Ph.D. now and literally the smartest human being I have ever known. My high school sweetheart was our resident photographer and documented the entirety of our high school lives, sharing snapshots of the most mundane but precious moments on her LJ. She’s a professional photographer and one of the best of our generation, in fact.
I’m now an ethnographer, working with images, language, and history to examine my life for the larger clues of what it means to be a human — much like I did during my early Internet days.
Entirely too much has changed on the Internet since I deleted my LiveJournal.
The few months before I was set to move away from Florida, I began a Great Purge. I would be leaving my childhood bedroom, intact, with a paranoid and unreasonably nosey abusive parent having full access to the entire contents of my mind. My abuser had gotten in the habit of looking through my Internet history and trying to break into my email accounts to read my correspondences, so having the digital journal that chronicled years of my life that she was never privy to wasn’t an option.
Then there was a matter of the physical evidence of my life — my sun is in Cancer and my rising sign is in Pisces which means I am the most sentimental motherfucker you will ever meet and I throw away NOTHING: I had a large hunter green plastic file bin of every single project I did in Elementary school, every journal I wrote in from the ages of 12 to 18, and every passed note to crushes and best friends, every letter from pen-pals, all my report cards, all my school portraits, all the poems and song lyrics I’d ever written.
An entire archive of my life sat inside the closet of my bedroom and underneath my bed.
I spent months sifting through all this life material, trying to decide what would come with me to college and what I could reasonably leave behind. I’d return each winter and summer break and bring back a little more, I thought.
Before I began writing in a journal, I’d been assigned the Diary of Anne Frank as a part of my advance reading mini program in fourth grade. All the books we were reading were too easy for me so I was able to start reading the fifth grade picks a year early. Mrs. Dumerville, my fourth-grade teacher, saved my life in making the decision to assign me Anne’s diary to read.
There was an on-going campaign of Holocaust denial happening in the American culture at the time, but growing up in South Florida, just about every other classmate of mine was Jewish so there was a lot about Jewish culture and history I was learning directly through my classmates, who were descendants of survivors of recent genocide.
There was no room for denial for me.
When I was given Anne’s diary to read, it exposed me to both the craft and the importance of a personal record. My entire understanding of World War II was shaped by the books I read at the time including Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, Eli Weisel’s Night, John Hershey’s Hiroshima, and finally, Anne Frank’s Diary of Anne Frank and three of those texts were built on first-person accounts of actual war and the actual atrocities that people survived, or in Anne’s case, perished because of.
I didn’t start keeping a journal immediately after reading the Diary but when I began a journal a little over a year later, it was because Anne’s voice echoed in my head often. Her observations about needing to have evidence of her life, knowing that her life would surely be extinguished before her time, made me think seriously that it might be important for me to put down on paper some things that were happening in my own life that I didn’t want to go unrecorded, so I asked for an additional notebook before starting fifth grade and I set about recording my life.
In deleting my high school LiveJournal, I knew I had a few volumes of even deeper writing about those four years and so I felt I could free myself of that formative digital space without much loss. I wasn’t, however, able to save the rest of my extensive archive from my abuser. I now have no archive of my childhood or adolescence, all of it lost to an unpaid storage unit after my family’s home was foreclosed.
I made the mistake of thinking that my archive was as important to me as my family and when went I went to retrieve what I thought would at least be a portion of it, I came back with a few precious photographs from happier moments in my childhood.
My six years of writing and twice as many volumes of the life collected in those journals were gone, just like that.
Autoethnography is hard and particular work.
Unrelenting self-examination over years of your life isn’t an easy task to undertake but it is work you become worthy of, over time and with concerted dedication. The most apparent benefit to me is a deeper understanding of the humans I share and navigate a world with and an increasingly sharpened memory — especially handy when you consider childhood trauma steals significant chunks of your memory — so much of what I can recall and remember of my childhood with clarity and confidence comes from my daily practice of examining my life through writing.
I haven’t “worked” in any real capacity for the entirety of a year and I spend the bulk of my days reading, researching, and writing. This was the life I imagined for myself in the volumes of my childhood journals, though physically lost to me, some residue of my practice remains ever-present in my life now.
I wrote into being the life I’d hope to be living decades ago and decades later, I’ve finally caught up with myself.
Writing yourself into being is maybe the best, most important work we can all do now, so thank you for joining me in this work. This is my last essay of 2020 — a hell year that has felt like several centuries stuffed into twelve months. I am thankful for the rare reprieve I’ve found in this year that no one dear to me has been harmed or has perished in a time of mass death and crippling uncertainty. I’m most thankful for all of you who’ve become my audience after a long time writing for my audience of one, it feels really good to stretch myself and write, knowing many of you enjoy my observations and inquiries into the human condition.
The shape of this newsletter will change some in the coming year, primarily because I will still on hiatus from assignment photography for a bit longer which means I won’t be spending so much time lamenting and raging about work, which I am thankful for. Outside of one cookbook project, I’m not entirely certain how I’ll be making an income but I will be applying for grants, curating and jurying, and working on getting essays published to cobble together a living.
But I’m living and I’m happy with how I’m living and that’s what’s important, I think.