Course:LiveJournal from 2002-2010
I grew up on LiveJournal, a blogging website from the 2000s that is, remarkably, still around but not used in great numbers by anyone outside Russia after its acquisition by a Russian company. LiveJournal had two important aspects to it. One was personal blog posts made on your private or public blog space and the other was communal blog posts, which you could comment on in blog spaces simply called “communities”. These “communities” could be about anything and there truly was an “LJ Comm” for anything you could imagine. I was in fashion comms, fandom comms, music comms, poetry comms and drama comms (think a community like r/subredditdrama where we rubbernecked other communities’ arguments). On LiveJournal, the teen girls I was internet friends with would post their struggles, their outfits, their poems and screenshots and reviews of movies and TV shows they had watched that fit a certain indie aesthetic.
I met people who have grown up with me and whose writing I have seen develop into journalism careers, novels and books of poetry as adults. It cannot be overstated how inspirational the art, books, films and friendships I was exposed to as a teenager on LiveJournal have been for me. A very popular LJ comm called “black_cigarette” was a place where indie and alternative girls would post snippets of their lives and what inspired them. I would grasp onto those posts like a leech and try to make them a part of my life too. I tried to absorb them into my soul so I could be as beautiful and ethereal as I thought those girls and young women were. I posted a few times and I still wonder if anyone ever felt that way about my posts as well.
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