notes on a dying form
on internet diaries and anonymity and being absolutely Shook while Perceiving someone
Dear friend—
I recently read an essay/newsletter by writer Cat Valente rage-mourning Twitter in the context of a long history of idiots and corporate baddies ruining community-built internet spaces, and she mentioned a site called Diaryland.
I had never heard of Diaryland. Valente mentioned that Diaryland still remains as it was in the 90s, crystallized in amber—except people still post regularly. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the hyperlink she included in her essay.
My friend, when I got onto the site, I was kind of floored.
Diaryland is full of visually simple blogs, minimal but customized, with all the charm and rough edges of the 90s internet. On the front page of the site, you can find a section of diarists who have most recently posted, and I sifted through these recent posters (who, after my subsequent visits, seem to be the same 10-15 people doggedly, regularly updating).
In one diary, I found beautiful vignettes, precisely rendered scenes which I assume were pulled from the writer’s day; in another, strange digital collages of pinup girls, seemingly cobbled together using MS Word clipart; one account that seemed less like someone’s diary and more like an experiment in serial fiction (something about tracking down her husband’s killer …).
But I landed on one particular diary that I found myself falling deeper and deeper into.
The writer appears to be a young woman in her early 30s who posts nearly every week (has done since her teen years), now mostly about her struggling marriage.
She and her husband have recently started couples therapy, which hopefully helps. But she writes how she misses the simpler times when they were newly married, when she still felt desired, when they were struggling in other ways, but happy together. She writes frankly of both their mental health struggles and their fights, but also of small things, like how her husband traps and brings home a stray black cat that looks just like the cat she lost a few months ago.
I was taken aback by how intensely personal the entries were. How emotionally and unabashedly she writes about the daily joys and agonies of life, of aging and wanting things and being grateful, of her parents helping her sell the house she had bought for her ailing father-in-law, of trying a remote job to avoid driving in cold, dark winter mornings.
I found it poignant, the freedom with which this person wrote, in no small part because of her anonymity. And I forgot how that used to be the way of the internet. In the mid-aughts of stranger danger and internet safety, anonymity was the norm. Now, it feels like the opposite.
I use my name and face here, on my Twitter; I have a personal website and a public LinkedIn profile (lol). I feel increasingly like I’ve lost something more bright and raw than the parts of the internet I currently inhabit.
Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy writing publicly and I appreciate the people in my life who read what I write. But I do find myself nostalgic for that time of anonymity and forthrightness.
Obviously, there’s a dark side to anonymity (see: the noxious swamp of Twitter replies).
But I was struck by how intense these Diaryland entries were, and how they contrasted with the stuff I’ve been reading most on the internet these past few years.
And by that, I mean the personal nonfiction of newsletters, magazines, and newspapers. The essays and short-form memoirs and autofiction.
So much of it is fraught with the Now, as in the PoliticalSocialCultural Now. And this genre of internet writing—at least for me—seems to operate under the assumption that someone’s experiences and thoughts are only worth reading if they elucidate something about that Now.
Yes, I count myself as part of this—just look at what I’ve written here so far, lol. And it’s the logic under which I choose what to publish and what not to; this idea that others will only find my most Big and Relevant thoughts worth reading.
I don’t mean to drag Big and Relevant and explicitly political/philosophical writing. Obviously that kind of writing is valuable and essential (or at least it usually is). But I forgot there were other ways to write on the internet.
Of course, the life of this Diaryland writer is political, because everything is political. Her relationship with her husband; her class and how it enables her to do this and that; her struggles with mental health and that of her husband and how they are handled, etc.
But the project of her diary isn’t to spell that out. She expresses no hot takes, no symbolism (X event is indicative of Y in the context of Z forces flowing all around us).
Rather, it seems she is just trying to represent her life as honestly and as well as she can. And that’s where these diary entries find their meaning: in the sum of them, the changing times, the little moments; in, cornily and truthfully enough, the universal in the individual.
I am always, almost compulsively, looking toward the future. I am also nearly at this diarist’s age, but still a few years away. So it was a little terrifying to imagine myself in her life, the good and the bad.
Especially because so much of media for young people seems to only encompass the teens and twenties. If an alien looked at our shows and movies and novels, they might think that life grinds to a halt at 30. No more romance, no angst, no earth-shaking change.
But this writer’s diary entries reminded me that adult life can be just as emotionally fraught; that life often gets harder and more complicated with age. And they reminded me that it would all arrive for me, soon. The regrets and nostalgia, the routine and small joys.
Yet, I found it comforting, too; finding a stranger who so closely speaks your worst, most mundane fears and hopes; their heart-wrenching honesty, unflinching at the painful and painfully earnest. I may still find this in other forms and venues on the internet, but I’m not sure if those other forms and venues feel like this.
Thanks for reading, take care,
—mia xx