overshare

Writing about personal blogs yesterday reminded me of a little story I'd like to share with you on this lovely Thursday morning.

About ten years ago, I moved into a new flat. The girl already living there was someone I was friendly with but didn't know that well, and for my first weekend in the flat, she was away. The internet was set up but there was no WiFi (I am just THAT OLD) and my room was quite a long way away from the router. My new flatmate told me that while I waited for my super-extra-long cable to show up, I was welcome to use her computer. This I accepted gratefully (because my internet addiction was and is shameless) and about five minutes after getting my stuff set up, I went into her room to check my emails. I say emails, I mean diary sites. The internet basically was online journals to me in the mid-2000s. As it turned out, my new flatmate and I had that in common. Her homepage was her LiveJournal. Hey, I thought, LiveJournal! I have a LiveJournal! We should be LiveJournal buddies!

I read a couple of entries. Standard stuff about her day, her plans for the weekend, my moving in, grumbles about her course. Her writing had a voice - not the one I would have expected from knowing her personally, but that made it more interesting if anything. She clearly had an audience that she was writing to. I was enjoying myself, so I read a bit more of it. I thought it was the kind of journal that I'd probably go some way back into, once we were LiveJournal friends.

In amongst her daily happenings, she grumbled about a guy. I knew about this guy, because she grumbled about him all the time, from the very first conversation I had with her. He was not her boyfriend. Very definitely, deliberately and specifically not her boyfriend. There was a photo of him Blu-Tacked to her monitor. I knew all the stories she told, all the incidents she mentioned, up until the one where she talked about going to visit him. Here is a short dramatisation:

BRAIN: Oh, hey, that's why she wasn't in class that time. I didn't know he lived there. This all sounds a bit awkward and sad and... aww, they kissed! That's quite sw - HEY too much information here! I didn't need to -
[HAND moves mouse to the Close button and attempts to click. BRAIN intervenes]
BRAIN: Hang on, not yet. Wow, this is... specific. And surprisingly - YIKES, Flatmate, you did what now?
[HAND and BRAIN engage in a short wrestling match for control of the mouse]
BRAIN: I can't read this!
HAND: So let me get rid of it!
BRAIN: I CAN'T it's like it's got my soul in a headlock.
HAND: I'm shutting this down NOW.
BRAIN: But what happened when they got down off the - JESUS CHRIST
HAND: Release control of the mouse, Brain.
[BRAIN releases the mouse and HAND changes the screen]
BRAIN: I need to go and think about... things... that aren't.... things.

I should clarify at this stage that 30-year-old Jen wouldn't have thought the things in that journal were as horrific as 20-year-old Jen thought they were, though she'd still much rather not have had the guy's photo staring her in the face while she read them. I went about my own internet business, thinking, "Holy crap, Flatmate sure does like to overshare."

Completely forgetting that I'd been logged in to her journal as her.

When I got internet on my own computer and went to add her as a friend, I found no sign of any such entry, and I was slow enough to spend the first five minutes convinced that she'd had regrets about the overshare and deleted it. All the detail aside, it read like a public entry, but then of course it did. All of my private diary entries read like public ones, because that's how I write in that medium. I still refer to an imaginary reader as "you" and apologise for repeating myself and get sheepish when I write intimate stuff. I would hate for someone to read my private writing, and I really don't think I'd have read hers if I'd realised, but at the time I was barely aware that private LiveJournal entries were a thing and I really thought she was just monumentally indiscreet.

So, sorry, former flatmate. I accidentally read your private sex stuff and couldn't think about anything else whenever I looked at you for the whole time we were living together. And I sort of wish I hadn't remembered it now. Oops.