by Pamela Ribon
It was a rough year. I didn’t know where I was headed or what I wanted. I didn’t know who I wanted to be or what kind of relationship I wanted. Once I turned twenty-five, every facet of my life changed. The journal was a big part of that. It helped me find friends, jobs, and some of the most important people in my life. It’s really quite amazing, when I step back and look at it.
3) Like Anna, were you concerned about how much of your personal life was exposed on your journal?
I wasn’t for a while. I didn’t realize how many people were reading, I guess. It was when other people became concerned for my safety, or felt that they were getting exposed in the process, that I started to pull back a little. With any kind of one-on-one relationship there becomes a sense of entitlement. No matter how big my audience, they’re all reading one at a time, and that can be a very intimate experience for a reader; it’s like getting private e-mail. That’s when people can begin to think that we’re close friends. I’m telling them stories about my life. It’s easy to forget that it’s one-sided.
There have been times when I felt someone was pushing into my life because he or she had identified with my writing and felt we should be “best friends.” But it’s never been often enough or strong enough that I wished I’d never kept a journal. I don’t share anything I wouldn’t tell a good friend anyway.
4) Why did you take the journal offline in 2001?
Closing pamie.com meant I’d lost my job. I was a failed dot com. I had to move forward. It wasn’t something I did out of spite.
I had lost my funding from ChickClick. Running pamie.com was a full-time job by then and I knew I was spending too much time working on the forum, a place of temporary exchanges that were mostly the writings of other people. I had to shut the site down, but I never imagined the response I’d get as a result!
There were e-mails, bulletin board discussions, letters begging me not to do it. One girl told me that she mentioned the site closing to her therapist, and how that bummed her out. Her therapist asked her, “Is this girl named Pam? Because you’re my third patient this week to mention this site closing.” Can you imagine? I love that story.
Another girl wrote (and I’ll never forget this): “You taught me how to wear a bra, put in a tampon, and to wipe from front to back. For this, I thank you. You’ve also taught me to follow my dreams.” I’m Big Bird for Young Adults!
5) Is that why you returned to online journaling in 2002?
Yeah, I missed it. I missed my readers. And I felt that I’d learned from my mistakes.
6) Did you find writing the book more or less satisfying than maintaining the journal?
It’s very satisfying to write a book—don’t get me wrong—but compared to the thousands of words I’d written for the journal, it was a much smaller achievement, volume-wise. I’m excited that the book could potentially reach a bigger audience than the site does. But the best part about writing a journal is the immediate feedback; within mintues I start getting e-mail from readers sharing their stories, commiserating, or debating something I was thinking about. That’s infectious, that kind of contact. It makes you feel important. The book felt like the next logical step, and that’s the best part about it. I want to see what’s going to happen next.