Nifty News from "The Taylor Swift of Facebook"
Introducing my First Book of Collected Writings - YAY
When you write like I do on public forums like Facebook, people are constantly telling you that you should collect your stuff into a book. So I did it, it’s done, are you happy now??
I’m sure you’re thrilled.
It’s mostly Facebook’s fault, to be clear. All their terrible updates have buried my writings, and instead of becoming a walking version of the Old Man Yells At Cloud meme, I decided (at some point during COVID isolation) to do this. Below you’ll find some more details from the introduction of the book, and below that you’ll find some excerpts of this madness.
Introduction:
What are you doing and why?
When I was in my early twenties, back in ye olden times, Facebook had this rarely-used feature called “Notes.” Rarely used by anyone except me, I should say.
Notes were essentially Facebook’s blogging feature, where you could write long-form posts (back when there was a character limit on regular posts, oh how times have changed). You also had access to formatting options and could even embed pictures if you were determined enough.
Most helpfully for my purposes, though, you could tag people in them, not because you’d mentioned them, but because you thought they might find the post interesting and/or have worthwhile feedback. Tags would unobtrusively show up in a sidebar on the note, not cluttering up the content or the comments section. And, somewhat surprisingly, people I tagged actually read and enjoyed the things I posted, and sometimes their friends would see the tags and read them too, even recommending them to others, rendering me a very niche kind of internet famous.
It was a perfect and wonderful system, so naturally, Facebook destroyed it bit by bit, finally discontinuing the Notes feature entirely in 2020. Because 2020 wasn’t bad enough.
And they didn’t just discontinue it; they also made it almost completely impossible to find your old Notes, which used to be easily accessible under the intuitive “Notes” tab on your profile. So simple, so elegant, so gone.
So here we are—now in the age where self-publication is an easier option than a Facebook archive. What a world.
I’ve trawled the bowels of Facebook to collect all of my Notes so that they can be preserved in a more permanent and accessible form. I’ve laid out the text in this book myself, and I have to be honest that I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I think the rough and homemade feel is in the spirit of what it feels like to read the original Facebook posts, written by a young 20-something Jewish kid just trying to carve a place for herself in the world and using writing as her primary form of therapy. I like to think that this may become a common sort of collection in the future, as more and more of us grow up with social media, but I’m willing to stick my neck out and be the first.
That’s also one of the reasons I left in Facebook’s estimated reading times, even though the early ones are completely wonky—as a reminder of the original format of a bygone era. Also, I like to know what kind of time commitment I’m getting myself into when I start reading, and you probably do too.
A note on the Notes themselves
These Notes span primarily from 2009 to 2016, so they don’t necessarily represent who I am now. (I was 19 in June 2009, hadn’t yet started college, when I posted my first Note, just to clarify the timeline here.) What they do is provide fragments and snapshots of who I was then, and the struggles and insights of a person growing up with my particular background, my particular talents, at this particular time.
Upon digging back through all of them to assemble this, I discovered that despite the angsty rambly teenage beginnings, they grow to become incredibly thoughtful and smart and adventurous and surprisingly funny in a way I had forgotten I could be, and I hope you’ll find them as entertaining and thought-provoking as I did.
You get to watch me grow up, witness my confusion, feel my pain, watch me fail, succeed, fail, and try again.
There are generally no trigger warnings, so please bear in mind that pretty much every topic is on the table—from misogyny to homophobia to depression to fatphobia to sexual assault. The pieces in this volume can be raw and unfinished, much like I was and continue to be. I have resisted the urge to go back and edit or add in constant clarifying bits from the future like “I DON’T THINK LIKE THIS ANYMORE.” For instance, we’ve learned a lot more about Joss Whedon in recent years. Awareness of which terms are considered derogatory has also spread much further. You’re going to have to trust that I’ve learned a few things in the interim, but that I still find value in the original work and wish to allow the past some room to breathe without Present Me’s defensive interference or censorship.
(Except for the good stuff. If there’s any stuff you think is awesome, please assume that that part of me has stayed exactly the same.) (That’s a lie. Some of the best things in here feel like pieces of myself that I lost somewhere along the way and would like to get back.)
[Very occasional comments from the future will be in this font, which is called “Futura” because future, geddit?] [Obviously substack’s limited formatting options don’t actually let me use Futura here but just go with it.]
Some of these Notes were published in other places too, some were school assignments, some are original fiction, some are poetry, some are song lyrics, most are prose. There may even be one or two pieces that I never got around to posting anywhere before. Some reference other people, and I do my best to either portray them respectfully or hide their identities, although reminder: these are snapshots of who they were then, and not necessarily who they are now. Others have learned and grown as well. Please be kind in your judgments. (Preserving anonymity when possible is the main reason some of these may have been slightly altered from their originals.)
Some of these Notes were the primary reasons multiple people fell in love with me, but my lawyers assure me that I am not legally responsible for that. (Kidding. As if I have lawyers.)
I know they helped a lot of people feel less alone during those years, and I hope that they hold up and can still provide that for new readers.
If that’s you, well, thank you for taking a chance on me.
To give you an idea of the kind of eclectic mishmash of formats, styles, and content that this collection contains, I’ve picked out a few excerpts. Here you have…
…a table of contents…
…another table of contents…
…some classic poetic poetry…
…some fiction…
…some fiction with fun background info on how it had previously been published without my consent…
…painful self-analysis…
…helpful explanatory Judaism primers…
…musings on baseball and fandom…
…and some school papers, for good measure:
Basically, if you’ve ever been a writer, or had a writer friend, this is probably what it’s like to flip through our notebooks. Minus most of the grocery lists and crossed-out unfinished garbage.
But I think you’ll find, as I did in putting this collection together, that all of these disconnected tiles gradually start to fill in a mosaic of an evolving human whose specifics may be different from yours, but whose internal landscape is nonetheless familiar.
At least I hope so. Let me know.
Thanks for reading this edition of SM’s Movie Cramming Project, which is also a bit like flipping through my notebook, but with more movie reviews. If this post intrigued you, feel free to share it. All support is appreciated!