🌱 poking my head out of the soil

hi! i'm victoria (they/them), a journaler and former chronically online person slowly finding my way back into public forms of writing.

i grew up on livejournal and tumblr and posted ("microblogged"?) nearly every day of my teens and twenties. i posted about the music i loved (radiohead), the books i was reading (lots of murakami), the movies i watched (pacific rim), and cultivated my taste in these things with other similarly online folks. i met many wonderful people this way, and felt a lot of comfort knowing that there were kindred spirits out there who also felt more comfortable online than they did IRL--they were my people.

as a teen, the internet was my refuge from school where, i assumed, no one else could possibly love radiohead or doctor who the same way i did. and in my twenties, the internet was where i poured all of my uncertainty and worry, and had people (read: followers) around who would validate me and comfort me, keeping me from reaching out to the people around me IRL. for these reasons, i tended to hide in these online spaces to the detriment of my own social growth--and my own mental health. during the height of COVID, i, like many people, drifted away from social media. i'd always had a tendency to compulsively check my notifications, but stuck inside and stir-crazy during lockdown, i literally did nothing else. i needed to stop.

i started to find comfort in journaling. beginning in 2020, i reinvigorated a love for writing "the analog way" (by which i mean: spending too much money on stationery during a trip to japan, hoarding notebooks for unknown purposes, writing morning pages i'll never read again, etc). it's become a ritual for me to journal before bed, and to document my days in a medium i don't feel gross about revisiting--unlike my old twitter feed.

i love my little notebooks and daily journaling practice--they bring me a lot of joy and help me feel grounded. but lately i've been thinking about what it would mean to share my writing with people again.

a stack of still-plastic-wrapped notebooks (from a 2025 trip to japan) + my panda pilot kakuno (a recent birthday gift from a friend)

the rise of substack and the resurgence of personal websites has made me want to get back into posting for the first time in years. when i say "posting," i mean in the old-fashioned blogging sense, not in the twitter sense. i want to put my thoughts online in a way that is intentional, that reflects the kind of footprint i want to leave in the world, that is expansive and doesn't reduce my thoughts to a certain word count, that allows room for nuance (and perhaps long-windedness).

i've also been wanting to exercise my long-atrophied muscle of posting for a public audience and, most importantly, not getting caught in the trap of perfectionism before hitting publish. during my livejournal days, i sent angsty little missives to a small audience of strangers and didn't think twice about it. they commented on my posts with commiseration and comfort and good faith (even though i was a 13 year-old complaining about homework), and i did the same on theirs. i want to regain the ability (confidence? tenacity?) to do that again, but with the aim of expressing myself and connecting with others (not the same as garnering likes, which feel to me like a black hole of dopamine hits).

via the wayback machine, a public post i made on my old livejournal (now purged and deleted, so i can't access any of the private posts anymore). did i realize how blunt i sounded? does anyone even remember what a "friends cut" is???

when it comes to writing publicly, i want to get to the middle ground between:

because neither of those extremes sound appealing to me.

i'm hoping this small corner of the internet can be something of that middle ground, where i talk about what i'm thinking about and interested in and work my way to some kind of meaning about it. maybe that will be interesting to you as well?

ty for reading,
vkl