The power of waffling.
I’ve always said, repeatedly ever since I got my lj and started to engage with fandom, that I didn’t want to fragment my life. I don’t want to keep my real life and my fandom life separate; I don’t want to keep my real life friends separate from my online ones. The idea of even attempting to do that is ridiculous, because there’s so much overlap and because I’m so heavily engrained in internet culture as part of what I do actively in real life.
Working at probation was hard for me because I HAD to keep my fandom life out of my real life so I wound up doing things like locking my entire LJ, deleting entries when real life people found them, and signing up for Facebook as a J-pop idol and not myself, haha. It was all very frenetic and stressful.
But now I have a job where my co-workers write Smallville fanfic and call each other Lostheads. So, yeah. I feel free to unseparate everything once again, and it feels great.
Except. Except.
This whole LJ thing.
Ugh, this whole LJ thing. Should I stay or should I go? Should I attempt to turn my livejournal into something that can adapt into this new phase of my life, or should I just start over (the way, for example, Dorrie has so charmingly done, the way I have been trying and awkwardly failing to do here on this blog) and make something completely new?
And if I want to make a blog that is completely new, can I stand to lose that connection that I have had with my LJ community? I mean, the answer is really, really, no. But at the same time, with that sense of connectedness comes a sense of expectation, and I want to break away from that as much as from LJ specifically. But then - what are my options?
Can I have both?
I want both. I want to have LJ and LJ’s community and I want to have a space that feels self-contained, separate, apart, like starting over. Something not particularly tied to fandom, but specifically tied to me.
The tricky part is that I, at this point, can’t and don’t want to extricate myself from fandom. But at the same time, I want a blog that doesn’t come with fandom expectations.
So, to sum up:
1) I want a blog that doesn’t come with fandom expectations.
2) But I don’t want to separate out my life into fandom/real life
3) I want to keep my connections to my LJ friends and my fandom community on LJ
4) But I’m still quite upset and unhappy with the prospect of coming back to LJ itself.
So, yeah. I just don’t know what to do with myselllllf.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “The power of waffling.,” an entry on Bookshop
- Published:
- 12.12.07 / 10am
- Tags:
- fandom, livejournal, me
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New journal? I dunno. :/
(Also, I should point out there’s no RSS feed of dorrie’s new blog, so I can only keep up with her when I remember to. Only paid and permanent users can create RSS feeds.)
There is! On both LJ & IJ it is “plainasdaylight” just FYI.
Um. Hi, Aja. :)
I think… probably this was easier for me, because I’m not participating in fandom in the same ways I used to, and I have no desire to, so I don’t feel the same sense of loss. I created a new “me” space (the blog you linked to) where I don’t separate out any of myself, but then I keep a friends-only IJ for the things I might want to say on *any* topic (fandom or personal) that I wouldn’t want to put in a public, “real-life” blog. I have LJ-style interaction with a very small group of friends, and then the part of me that is public is just an extension of that. If that makes sense. It’s just the difference between what I would say at a party or in a coffee shop, and what I would say on my couch at home with just my nearest and dearest. But I think you crave something even different from all of that, which is what LJ gave you, and I totally get why you are angsting over that. If I still wanted it, I would be angsting too.
Bottom line, though? I never thought I could be made really, really happy simply by leaving LJ. But that’s exactly what happened. I have never felt better about my online world than I do right now.
well you are never going to be content with this nqr blog, and you are disgusted with the way livejournal is run. i see only one option: disguise yourself as a russian dictator and go take over.
If you stop participating in fandom, people eventually stop expecting you to, and it’s awesome.
i don’t want to stop participating in fandom!!!! That’s not what I meant by expectations. I meant mostly *how* I’m expected to participate - like, with a specific level of engagement or a specific *way* of engaging, and with personas and assumptions built-in.
honestly that’s why posting that death note fic anonymously was AWESOME, because I could still engage with fandom the way *I* wanted; but when people found out it was me doing the engaging, I couldn’t engage in the same ways. Hahaha, I’m like Jasmine sneaking out of the temple. :( I hope no one reads this comment. D:
LOL.
How do you live without icons?
Meh. I don’t know, I read what you write and I think it sounds like a very small, flocked journal does most of this and reduces the expectations, because you limit it to those who expect nothing.
♥