Thanks to some scuttlebutt over on Bluesky on New Year’s Day regarding the site’s short- and long-term prospects, I recently decided to visit my old LiveJournal accounts and start cut-and-pasting the text from my posts into a Word document. Nothing fancy — I’m not preserving the formatting, tags, comments, timestamp, or any other peripheral information. Just the date, title, and primary text. I’m also not including memes or shared links that are only accompanied by a line or two of snarky commentary. Thus far, I’ve saved the period covering November 3, 2004 through July 29, 2005. The file contains over 28,000 words and is nearly 75 pages long.

Damn, I wrote a lot — and frankly overshared far more — back in the day.

I haven’t looked at most of this material in years. So, while working my way through the posts, I’ve skimmed them. It’s been… enlightening. The period I’ve downloaded thus far covers a period in time where, in retrospect, I was beginning to burn out in my previous profession. At the time, I thought I was just in a bad work situation, and during 2005 I had a multi-month long job hunt that led me to the last of the positions I held as an executive assistant. However, the combination of rereading what I wrote and what I recall from being an E.A. at a big four accounting and consulting firm makes it pretty clear that it wasn’t situational at all. No, it was the job itself. The things I’m complaining about in those posts are frankly the kinds of things I dealt with at all my jobs as an E.A. from the summer of ’96 through the end of ’06.

It’s also the period where Brandon was a toddler, and it’s a joy to be reminded of little things that happened during that time that I hadn’t thought about in years. It was also the period where I launched Some Fantastic — something I’m still immensely proud of. Frankly, in retrospect, I’m not entirely certain how I managed to achieve so much during that period.

Reading all this material is also motivating me to start posting here more. I certainly don’t need to post as often as I did in the old LJ days, and that certainly applies moreso to the oversharing that took over there. However, the Bluesky and Facebook formats encourage a style of writing that really isn’t me. The one thing I’ve successfully internalized over the past few years is the need to be my authentic self. It’s time to apply that to posting online as well.