Is there a sensation of being on the internet or in virtual worlds that you think of fondly? What is it, and where did your affinity for that sensation come from? Does it come from nostalgia and longing? Or does it come from personal and political beliefs? Can you describe a past memory or imagine a space on the internet that has that atmosphere? How is it designed? Maybe you could get into the logistics and politics? Editing privileges? Safeness and moderation?
I was young and the internet was new.
There was a freedom I chased and found in the imagined communities of virtual space—worlds I lost myself in because it was the purest way I understood having agency at the time.
I was nine when I gave myself a new name. It was something angsty, in alternating caps; it was the first time someone asked me to define myself in a way I would see reflected back to me every time I spoke. I chose my favorite numbers, 7 and 2. For a brief time I typed lime green messages on a pink background, and then white messages on a black background, and with each change I found power in the ability to control my voice in this particular and immediate way. I used avatars of flashing, pixelated girls that I saw myself in—or perhaps just desperately wanted to be—angelic, coy, scantily dressed, brave, young, white. I wouldn’t know what it meant to not be white for a long time.
There was a vastness of this terrain that felt so safe and unfettered. I threw myself into it, willed it to hold and to cradle me, dared it to own me. I listened to doors open and close. I found home in the ability to represent myself in the truest ways I would come to understand how—through writing I once thought was Very Good, through images made on Microsoft Paint I didn’t know yet was Graphic Design. There was something about visibility and representation that I reveled in, hungrily, forcefully, as if I could spill all of me and it could confirm that I was indeed real. That I would be able to see myself on a page and know I existed.
It was a space where I was allowed to become. In writing so publicly I learned what it was to be received. I learned the weight of my words, as if there was a gravity far heavier, more tactile than the one in the physical world. It held me closer to the ground, it held me deeper to its core, it held me tighter to itself, it held me.
I learned that creation and display were at once both truth and facade. I learned how to be honest. I also learned how to be entirely the opposite, and that fiction could still be raw, and still be painful. I surrendered myself to the written lives of girls I would never meet but felt so a part of and so connected to. I learned that sometimes their narratives were both seductive and dangerous, and I learned when to stay and when to go. I learned that I could find safety in spaces that were not safe. I learned that no one would know, and no one could stop me, and it made me feel greedy and it made me feel restless. I learned that I could live in fantasy, and I learned that it was often far greater than the truth.
There was such a strong sense of solace and awakening that I tore myself open for. I fell in love with strangers over conversations that bled from midnight to dawn and disappeared, without ever knowing their names. Every time it felt like being born again. I didn’t look for them when they were gone and I learned that things didn’t have to last forever to change me. I learned that there was a certain freedom in becoming someone else. And I learned that there was a tremendous power in becoming entirely yourself.