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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: a time when placing your deepest thoughts online didn’t come with the baggage of oversharing, worries about whether you were being surveilled, or the restricted and gatekept nature of today’s platform economies. Instead, Livejournal represented my first deep engagement with technology in its purest form. I was lured in by its radical promise of creative and expressive autonomy, and I stuck around because, for a while, it delivered on those things and so much more.

I first learned HTML and CSS to update and customize my journal’s themes, in the process nurturing what would become an enduring love for building things for the Internet. I loved that I could list the music I was listening to as I wrote and posted entries, which gave me an outlet to share my evolving cultural tastes and preferences. Livejournal’s communities and groups were also where I began to deepen my relationship with my heritage, after years of denying and suppressing it while growing up as the lone South Asian American in my grade at school. I spent hours poring over the posts on forums for Bollywood and Indian culture, learning new things about my background from strangers all over the world who shared it.

While I have journaled intermittently throughout my life, my time on Livejournal represents my most consistent, active period of documenting my lived experiences and emotional growth. At some points I wrote in my journal almost every day, 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 latter entries were often tinged with a pain that is familiar to those who grew up in places 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.

Livejournal offered a space where I felt like I could truly, authentically be myself — but in a way where it also felt as though someone might actually listen. Even if, most of the time, I was still writing for an audience of one, the act of placing my deepest thoughts online for the world to see felt liberating in some ways, as though I was sending out a message in a bottle that might resonate with someone, somewhere. Over time, I built up a robust community of regular readers (my “friends list”) who offered support, advice, and empathy. In hindsight, the lack of judgment and true empathy I often felt as a result of my posts stands in stark contrast to today’s online spaces, where I dramatically limit what I share and often fear that if I don’t tread carefully, I will spark outrage and conflict by just being who I am and saying what I think.

This work reimagines entries from my Livejournal as 14-line poetic texts, loosely drawing inspiration from the 14-line sonnet and its traditional use as a vehicle for passionate romantic expression. Snippets from entries, ranging from the tail end of high school to the years following my graduation from college, are remixed into abstract, impressionistic portraits of the joys, anxieties, and insecurities of seeking intimacy and connection. 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.

Special thanks to CURSOR for providing the space for this work; Taper magazine (whose prompt for issue #14 provided the initial spark, even though the final product did not fit the scope); and Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes for the aesthetic inspiration.