everything and nothing at the same time

gaslight, gatekeep, girlblog

Girlblogging in 2011

A few months ago, I was introduced as a blogger to someone’s girlfriend at a party. While I don’t totally identify as such, this guy wasn’t totally wrong either. Roughly 20 years ago, I traded keeping a physical diary for a public, online diary. It started with a Xanga account, my username was llamaonavolvo because my nickname at the time was llama (random </3) and I was obsessed with Volvos (also random XD). I simultaneously maintained my LiveJournal account laundromat_love - the username was born out of some fantasy of a quirked up meet cute happening at a laundromat (40 Days and 40 Nights influence perhaps?). I’d later go on to make new Xanga and LiveJournal accounts, as well as branching out to Myspace bulletins, Blogspot, Tumblr, and YouTube vlogs. I went from llamaonavolvo, laundromat_love, wetnap, runawayship, ghosties, fleamarkets, amaliasoto, to mollysoda.

I’ve built a career on oversharing online, or rather, the perception that I’m oversharing. As a teenager, my Myspace bio read, “I want to tell you everything and nothing at the same time.” I consistently come back to that sentence. It has maintained its relevancy in my approach to being, sharing, and making art online after all of these years. Maybe this makes me sound smarter, or more calculated than I am. I didn’t set out to craft a persona or come off a certain way when I started blogging at 14. Instead, it was a long series of experiments, learning how to make myself seem more attractive or interesting through lots of trial and error. Sharing yourself online, as pure, and honest, and sincere, as you try to be, will always be mediated by the imagined other, the person you think will be reading, watching, consuming, saving, commenting, reblogging, whatever, on the other end. Regardless of how well you think you may be coming off to this imagined other, it’s ultimately out of your control, and you’ll ultimately be humiliated by some shit you did online after some time passes.

Spread from Green, 2017

Even when writing in my physical diary, I would imagine someone else reading it. This could be due to the sheer popularity of diary style YA books during my adolescence (Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging and The California Diaries series to name a few) or anxieties around a family member reading it. I always had this feeling that someday, my written diary would be public. I’ve shared my pre-online teenage diary in multiple forms since then. I’ve read passages from it at readings, and compiled some of my favorite entries for my 2017 Green zine. I still have that diary lovingly tucked away in my closet.

Now, my memories are scattered across the Internet. I can’t open up an old diary to remember what I was thinking or feeling, I have to hunt it down. I’m sifting through multiple accounts on defunct or dying platforms, trying to remember old passwords. My memories are linked to what I’ve shared publicly online, and what I still have access to. Access isn’t the only issue: what and how I choose to share, and the way my relationship to sharing online has evolved as I’ve gotten older, affects what I remember. I may have been sharing the mundane (sometimes juicy) details of my life on LiveJournal as a teenager, but by the time I was regularly using Tumblr it was much more cryptic. A physical diary is more likely to chart my emotional landscape on a more granular, day-to-day scale. In its absence, I’m left to fill in the blanks. The way I’ve put myself up online to be consumed, followed/unfollowed, remixed, downloaded, and discarded, is also the lens through which I see my life. If I choose to share it, I’m more likely to remember it.

Still from The Garden, 2020

In December of 2018, Tumblr announced that they would no longer allow adult content on their platform, giving users two weeks to back up their accounts before the ban went into place. I feverishly spent those two weeks archiving my Tumblr, screenshotting and logging all 3000 pages (30,000 posts). Forcing myself to go back through my Tumblr was painful, there were parts of me I didn’t want to see, parts of my life I had buried. I have a tendency to dump online and never look back. I don’t let myself delete things because I try not to be too precious about what I post. It’s an exercise in letting go of control, something we all do, willingly or not, when we post. While I’m thankful there’s so much of me, floating through the Internet in various states of cringe, vulnerability, longing, and playfulness, it’s not always easy to come face to face with myself after time has passed.

This post is an introduction to what I hope will be a regular exercise in cobbling together memories based purely on what I’ve posted online. I’ll be combing through the archives, and writing about what I find, using a specific post or piece of media as an anchor. My hope is that this can become a regular feature on this Substack, along with my bi-weekly, anything goes style posts. For now, I leave you with this Whole Foods Haul from 2018.