When the Internet Was Weird: How I Got Started as a Y2K Blogger
I didn't intend to get this deep, but here we are.
When I first published this piece last year, I wasn’t sure anyone would read it, let alone care about my memories of growing up in a tiny trailer park in the conservative South, or about sneaking onto LiveJournal during study hall and late at night just to write my heart out.
To my surprise, some of you did.
Lately, I’ve found a little more confidence in my voice here, and I’ve realized that so much of what I’m writing is about nostalgia and the unexpected emotions that come with looking back at the internet I grew up with, the places that shaped me, and the person I was becoming. Revisiting this essay felt like a natural next step.
So I polished it up, added a few new memories, and decided it deserved another trip around the internet.
Originally published in August 2025 | Revised July 2026
As a teenager, I was keeping a deep, dark secret, one that would have made my already complicated teenage years even more miserable if anyone in my family had found out that I was secretly online.
Online, I was living my best life and making internet friends. I spent hours discovering a version of myself that wasn’t labeled a burden or a villain by the people raising me, and it felt really good to connect with people who were like me.
It was 1999 and I was a sophomore in high school. On this particular day, I was sitting in yearbook class designing layouts in PageMaker for our end-of-year publication. On this particular day, I skipped lunch to finish a spread when a friend rolled her chair over and casually asked me, “Hey, do you have a LiveJournal?”
That simple question changed my life. At the time, I had no idea, but looking back on it now, I can honestly say that LiveJournal became the gateway to my creative life. It was the first place where I felt free to express myself without a filter and where I discovered that writing was something I really enjoyed.
Just in case this is your first time here, let me give you a little backstory. Ya know, because some of the stuff I’m talking about doesnt seem that revolutionary, really, but for me it totally was.
I grew up in an incredibly conservative home. My grandmother raised me in our single-wide trailer in a ratty little trailer park in the South. She regularly searched my backpack under the assumption that she would find drugs or notes that implicated me as being a Satan worshiper, there wasnt a phone call that occured where she wasnt on the other house phone listening in to catch every word. She kept a close eye on just about everything I watched, read, and listened to. Her job, as she saw it, was to protect me from “the wrong influences.”
I do think she genuinely believed that the iron-fisted household she created would shape me into a respectable Southern Baptist girl and that her rules and restrictions would keep me out of trouble, I think she really hoped that I would quietly fall into line without questioning the big “why”, or worse questioning her authority.
Surprise: it didn’t.
Instead, it taught me how to disappear inside my own home. I learned early that it was safer not to have friends, to not to speak up, to always be working on homework and to always have an extra credit project on hand.
I learned how to tell whether she had a bad day before she ever said a word. I knew that asking to go to the movies or the mall would end with me being grounded before I’d even finished the sentence. By the time I entered high school, survival mode had become second nature.
Outside our screen door, though, there was hope for me. School was a safe haven and the internet was still young and seemed like it was broadcast in full technicolor. I soaked up every vivid hue I could find, in secret, of course, because at home everything felt black and white.
So, back to when I created my LiveJournal account during lunch while the yearbook spread for the chess club flickered in the background, I remember feeling a cool sweat gather at the back of my neck. I knew that if my grandmother ever found out, I’d probably lose what little freedom I had. (And if you’re wondering... yes. She eventually found it. But that’s a story for another day.)
The moment I clicked “Publish,” something shifted in me, I was officially a rebel and for the first time in my life, I had found a place that belonged to just me. LiveJournal didn’t just give me somewhere to write, it gave me proof that people like me existed. Kids who loved movies they weren’t supposed to watch and bands their parents didn’t understand and artsy teens who made things simply because they wanted to and who weren’t yet tainted by the monetization of everything. Growing up, my family had me believing I was the strange one, but ya know what, blogging dismantled that belief. Every new journal or community post I discovered made the world feel a little bigger.
As I got older and slowly created distance between myself and the life I’d grown up in, but I always found my way back to blogging. LiveJournal became Tumblr. Tumblr became Blogger. For a moment in time, I hosted my own website but, then life happened, work happened, responsibilities happened.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped documenting my little life and started sitting on the couch doomscrolling for hours, consuming carefully curated highlight reels of everyone else’s lives, served up to me via platforms that rewarded performance over authenticity. I didn’t know it then, but it was making me feel utterly depressed. The comparison game was hitting hard and I was just following along because it was the trend.
Lately, though, something came back to me. Maybe it’s the second development of the frontal lobe (I think this happens in our 40s, much like it does in our mid-twenties) but the short form view of the world I was catching from that little screen in my hand was kind of reminding me of the trailer park views I had as a kid. I definitely do not want to become an influencer, and I really don’t have some grand message for the world. But I miss the internet before everything became content. So I came back. I dusted off the idea of blogging again and eventually found this space, Substack.
I missed personal blogs, I missed browsing their blog’s sidebar (remember those!?). Substack kind of had that vibe, it definitely had the long form, storytelling element that I loved about Y2K blogging. Nothing shared back them was exceptionally profound and there certainly werent posts about posting strategies or how to optimize this or that. Substack has a little bit of that coaching influencer cringe but overall, I have to say, it kind of feels like home.
The older I get, the more I find myself returning to the things that first made me feel alive. It’s kind of a trend to go analog now, but thats really what it is…Watching movies on DVDs, writing long blog posts that will never go viral but might make one person feel a little less alone, journaling with a pen on paper, making ugly art in a sketchbook.
And yes, I realize there’s a certain irony in writing about living more analog on a digital platform, but I think that’s okay. Maybe Yesterthings Press isn’t about escaping the internet totally but more about reclaiming the parts of it that helped us all become ourselves in the first place.
I’m trying to build a slower, stranger internet like the one we had growing up. I think creative curiosity matters more than the algorithm and that those old blogs made us connect and find real friendships.
I just want a space where we get to live in color again, before everything became content.
You know what? I DO think this blog could unlock some magical doorway into a new, untapped version of you :^P