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FRIENDS ONLY
an interactive text by Roopa Vasudevan

From 2002 to 2009 — between the ages of 17 and 25 — I kept a Livejournal.

This period coincided with the dawn of blogs and social media, when placing your deepest thoughts online didn’t come with the baggage of oversharing, or worries about whether you were being surveilled. Instead, it was my first deep engagement with technology: its XXX and XXX, its XXX and XXX. I first learned HTML and CSS to update and customize my journal’s themes, in the process nurturing what would become a deep love for building things for the Internet. Livejournal’s communities and groups were where I first began to get in touch with my culture and heritage, after years of denying and suppressing it while growing up as the lone South Asian-American in my grade at school.

I used my journal to write about my daily challenges and triumphs; to work through the parts of my identity that I always imagined to be in conflict or at odds; and, most frequently, to express joy, despair, and frustration related to my first forays into dating and relationships. The entries in the latter category were often tinged with a pain that is familiar to those who grew up in areas where no one looked like them or shared their life experiences: an absolute, crushing certainty that I was never going to be enough, and that the people I found attractive would never reciprocate my feelings.

This work reimagines entries from my Livejournal as 14-line poems, loosely drawing inspiration from the 14-line sonnet and its traditional use as a vehicle for passionate romantic expression. Snippets from entries from four periods of my life are remixed into XXXX.

The title, FRIENDS ONLY, refers to entries that were restricted to my Livejournal “friends list” and unavailable for public view—which often consisted of the lovelorn texts reproduced here. Still, although these entries had a limited reach, the idea of performing for an audience remains—something that we have carried into our current existence as we place highly curated and manicured versions of ourselves online.