I wrote this back the spring. I’ve meant to edit and polish this into finer form, but I almost prefer the version of this that is raw and unwound. This is the unedited, unvarnished diary of a young girl on the internet. I just wanted it to exist somewhere else in cyberspace—so it’s here.
PRELUDE This lives within a coming of age on the internet story: a nostalgic period piece about the formative years of online existence. Technology not as the central focus, but as the undercurrent. Here are some words that may live in the back of your head as you read—Isolation and anxiety. Panopticon; solipsism. Navel-gazing worldliness. Performances in an empty theatre. Superficial interiority and self-delusion. Amateur; auteur; aesthetic. Splintering, then reconstituting. Taking ordinary things way too seriously. Knowing way too much about everything, everywhere, all the time.
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Emails are a birthplace. I was born under an August sky at age seven: the internet cable had been wired through our living room computer in the morning and I made my first decision about my pseudonymous self in the evening. I was too young to broadcast my full name to faraway strangers, so I christened myself a new identity. In this new world order, I was much more cosmopolitan and worldly. I was me; as someone else; closer to a dreamt-up self. Rarely do we get to choose who we want to be—yet at seven, an email gave me power, and it gave me place.
The networked mail system was invented in the 1970s because scientists wanted to talk to each other about laboratory findings; but in the decades that followed, the email protocol became a communication lifeline, a junk drawer, and then a passport to everything else. An email was a token of possibility and personality shared with every account I created after. I find a constellation of myself looking back, versions of me made for playing virtual penguin games and messaging friends; and ordering food and hailing cars and paying bank statements.
All my online memories are time-stamped and scattered across different addresses. An email says something about you: it’s the promise that you belong to cyberspace.
When you start, nobody tells you the internet is a sad place. It will break your heart if you don’t break it yourself first. To do that, it lets you fall in love with it; pulls you close and tells you what you want to hear. Let’s you believe that it was always about you.
The first time the internet made me cry, my best friend in middle school updated her Facebook status to say “she’s such a hypocrite.” I knew it was about me before she ever needed to tag me in it. I stared at it for thirty minutes, this ugly, public declaration of how awful I was as a person, and burst into tears. I cried because I was publicly flayed for something I didn’t fully understand. I felt fragile and dumb, and then cried some more.
Her post was two clicks away from bright, beaming headlines about housing foreclosures and oil spills and hurricane devastation. Americans were losing their homes and waterfowl were drowning in crude slicks, and my (former) best friend called me a hypocrite to the digital public before she said it to my face. There was a long list of other, better things to cry over.
I learned a few things from the news those years: the news taught the late-aughts a moral lesson about precarity. The adults put their trust in institutions, and the dramatic irony was that the institutions will choose themselves before they choose you, each and every time. Emotions were precarious, not precious, and so were human egos.
The whiplash is treacherous. Everything matters, but nothing matters. Minimizes what you’re feeling, again and again. Explodes the little things, like fiery sparks that push your emotional buttons; then shuts it away because the world is bigger than you. Too big for you and your little hypocrisy.
The best and brightest of a generation have lost themselves to yearning. Calcified desires substitute for personality.
Online, it’s hard not to start a sentence with “I want…” (so much and more). Yearning is marked by an intense longing for something, but the underbelly of longing is the anticipation of attainment. The composition of friends and friends of friends who have photoshoots in parks, brunch at exclusive restaurants, and bombast about how wonderful it is to be young and together; and the strangers and ingenues in the periphery who have every detail primed and printed for the centerfold. Far enough from your present reality, but close enough that it could be you in those photos too. Almost delirious with aspiration. They all take up space in the big social network of the tiny human brain, compromising any sense of self and replacing it with a farrago of influences. I want everything in this contemporary fairytale where everyone already has it all.
I wonder how much of the things I like are mine, because this is who I am and not because I want to be the kind of person who likes those things. My interests have otherwise been an accumulation: a shape-shifting body of media references and consumer interests. When you’re a young girl on the internet, you’re not really a girl. You’re a canvas; a mannequin dressed in dreams and purchase potential. The patina of attainment.
I am not that girl, and I may never become her. She’s part of me, though.
She’s in the way I order avocado toast with an over-easy egg at brunch; wear the flared skater skirts and chunky-heeled boots in my closet; light my lavender-scented candles and floor-to-ceiling fairy lights. She reads on Sunday afternoons not with a cup of coffee, but with strongly-brewed tea; she has a meticulous seven-step skincare routine, yet skips the daily face masks; she doesn’t journal every day, although she writes it all down in a public newsletter nobody reads. Her life is filtered in softened pastels—none of the hard edges, just the cozy moments—as if studied through pink-hued glasses.
The reel begins in collections of videos and posts. They call it the algorithm that feeds us. The beast of a learned machine that consumes inputs and regurgitates outputs for consumption. The oracle predicts what we want to watch or purchase. We wonder when we got so predictable, but we’ve always been hungry and keen to force-quit our addiction to novelty. Too much novelty becomes an uncomfortable disturbance, and the things you didn’t want to know about yourself, others, the world scare you into reticence. This is the folktale of a system knowing us better than we can ever know ourselves.
We want to feel intimately known but not thoroughly seen.
The folktale almost has a happy ending. This is good for us—no apples were poisoned in the making of the modern internet. It gave us endless entertainment when our days overflowed with boredom; it gave us friendship when nobody would sit with us at lunchtime; it gave us solace when our families were fighting in the room next door. It gave us so much, and we took it all.
The early 2010s were formative, and even that word doesn’t quite capture the transformational monolith. I resent the way I can invoke the sights and sounds of that early decade and reconstruct them from imagined memory. To know these with such familiarity is to have spent an adolescence wanting and waiting. Not knowing myself well enough to pry the elation from the melancholy.
Elation is the obsessive rapture of youth. A chorus of small voices sang we were scared of getting old (it feels so scary). It’s why we template our own self-formation against the checkboxes of change, the falling in love, emotional rupture, and acute transition—when everything is new because it is the first time—and maybe that is why we believe we will remember forever.
Melancholy is wondering—half hope, mostly agony. Wondering why we’re not good enough, wondering when it’ll get better. Tired and weary in our awkward, still-forming bodies, gaping vessels for all the loneliness and isolation and self-doubt. If only we could be a little less this and just a little more that.
I was locked away in my bedroom at home, and whatever eludes my memory of a childhood in the city is conflated with a young adult film reel. If elation is hoping for a storyline worthy of a protagonist, center-stage of an ordinary coming-of-age, then melancholy is expecting the main plotline and living in the bottomless pit of a knockoff side story. Wondering what it would take for us to have this too.
Vertigo is a feeling of displacement. At great heights, tiny crystals in the inner ear dislodge and send the world spinning. Gravity lets loose. There’s a physicality to the topsy-turvy motion as familiar surroundings warp and time caves in, but disorientation is an imagined feeling inside the head. Nothing has moved and little has changed.
Vertigo is also starting at the top of the camera roll and looking all the way down. My photo feed starts in 2009 and has not stopped since. The rules of time play differently here: take it from the top and go backward in time, all the way down until memory lane hits a dead end and memories can no longer be compressed into megabytes. That’s really where it all began.
My experiences are compacted into a pristine grid of 3x3 windows. Opening each window unlocks a memory I didn’t know I could still access, but I had originally left it there for safekeeping. Moments worth sharing (saving) are dressed up in brighter lighting and preserved for posterity. Public approximations of attainment.
As I get further, the spiral tightens. I watch change unravel over time. I notice the physical changes first: how I wore Aéropostale before I traded up for Abercrombie or how my hair shortens and makeup fades as I get younger. This is a carefully composed storyboard of candids from studying abroad to group poses in the chemistry classroom to selfies in my sunlit living room. The rule of thirds positions me slightly off-center in each moment, never in the middle, but always in the frame of focus. Others float in and out of the picture, a rotating cast lodged at the edges of the composition. If I scroll past long enough, they’ll unstick and disappear. Everyone leaves the grid, eventually; everyone but me.
A scroll down memory lane displaces me; everything has an echo of a timestamp. Every picture taken, text sent, or website visited is embalmed in the digital record. These snapshots have a long memory: they remember where I’ve been and who I was with, even when I don’t. Sometimes I’ll look at photos from old friends and acquaintances, and ask myself when I fell out of the frame. Simple explanations are they went to different schools or we fell out of touch; harder explanations reconcile their past importance with the size of their absence. People move on and everything has shfited.
My camera roll collapses upon itself: as if these were yesterday’s events, but I’m older now, and maybe I’ll never be as happy or unencumbered as I looked then. Just enough uncertainty to feel off-balance. I’m unmoored in time, almost like vertigo.
I can only describe the pieces of myself as they existed in my browser history in 2014. That year tells the origin story of girls who grew up under the grace of an aesthetic monoculture.
When I recollect the places I grew up, I think of my family home in Queens, New York and the towering school building in Tribeca and the dreamy hellscape of tumblr.com. Tumblr invited you to be whichever version of yourself you desperately desired, and if you weren’t, you had the capacity to mold yourself to the aesthetic. At age fifteen, I wanted to be anyone but the person I was becoming. I finished my homework after school, almost always stayed at home, and kept to myself to minimize attention. Dutifully striving for academic success didn’t make me any more interesting or compelling. Studiousness never substituted for personality.
I spent my teenage years on this anonymous microblogging platform, a place as untamed as it was melodramatic. Melancholy was the currency of commiseration: it was a truth, universally acknowledged, that nothing was as sad as growing up in the year 2014. This is the half of an online generation raised on the outskirts of the modern internet; girls who didn’t fit in anywhere else and found refuge for unconventional interests on the dark blue feeds of an endless blog. She didn’t aspire to conform to a world where mainstream institutions were broken, and she was nobody’s fool. She possessed a quiet urgency and intense anxiety, as if something had unsettled inside her and was still aching, to this day.
Most importantly, she was sad. Sorrow found her when she was young. A fanciful condition for experiencing something more meaningful than ruthless monotony. Tumblr normalized and held space for tragic glamor, peeling back the veneer of curated perfection to reveal a hardened romantic. Flower crowns with thorns. She wanted love but didn’t have anything close to it. Always knew the villain was the true hero of the story. Believed broken things were more beautiful. Could cut open her insecurities and never stop bleeding.
She didn’t have many reasons for sadness (but hers; and that of the world); she still thought it was closer to being more alive outside than dead inside. She envied the self-esteem and security that came so easily for others enamored with real life. The joy and contentment of having it all. So she sought it elsewhere, and the desire for self-destruction became teen girl agency. They could ugly cry in the dark and crave violence as satisfaction. Internalization as resistance against external pressure, wielded in sad song lyrics and brooding quotes. This is the language of angst, translated into verses of internet poetry. I loved all these things too, and still do.
The aesthetic is an invocation—electrified by elation and melancholy in synesthetic form. Internet archivists will eventually return to a mausoleum of washed-out pastels and soft grunge.
Aesthetics are best appreciated through a saturated VSCO filter, muted by grainy textures and pale overlays. Cotton-candy sunsets and hazy night skylines. Black and white grid patterns. Vintage artifacts of a simpler age: typewriters, mustangs, and vinyl records. The fashion was equally retro and saccharine, and clothing in closets are the last layers that are shed in self-image. Converses in puddles of rain. Lace accents on peter pan collars. Oversized flannels and ripped jeans. Teenage girls bore modern culture from a collage of internet influences. Non-institutional so as to be appropriately counter-cultural, yet enforced by a silent oath of reverence from girls who liked and wanted the same material things because it made them seem closer to special.
Music holds sonic memory, and the soundtrack of this time promised it was self-deprecatingly hipster. The indie pop was buoyant with just enough edge to be considered cool. It bounced off walls and invited a rapturous escape into adventure. Something about going to a best friend’s house and disparate youth. When pop was too enthusiastic, singer-songwriters crooned over folksy arrangements about lost loves and wasted dreams. Music taste is supposedly unique to each person, and these songs—consumed with feelings at the extremes—held everyone together. The indie canon was the single most recognizable artifact of the era. The soundtrack lives on in coffee shops and house parties and Spotify playlists.
The hellsite consecrated the aesthetic. Then we molded ourselves in its image.
Everything I know now, I know because I read it online. I saw everything through the internet.
If I could reach out and touch it, it would feel like matte keyboard keys or cool glass beneath my fingertips. Or even the violent burn of a laptop fan sitting atop my lap for hours. Digital devices are eerily quiet in the real world; there’s a stillness in spending time with them, punctuated by mechanical clicks and featherlight taps. If I really listened closely, I would admit the internet is terribly loud. Everyone is talking or has something to scream into the abyss. There’s always music playing from another room. I’m trying to say something too, scattered in comments and short texts, but I’m not sure I want anyone to listen.
In the early days, I wrought internet pixels with my bare hands. Endless creative freedoms spilled out from the world wide web, and I would be a lesser creator, writer, and technologist without it all. I studied design through photoshopped graphics and gifs of my favorite shows: here, art thrived as the manipulation of media. I learned literature through the retold fantasies of anonymous authors; fiction belonged to the fans who wrote it. I wrought fragments of websites in between closed brackets and curly braces, building a second home in my cozy little corner of the interwebs.
I lived in universes that weren’t mine and generously borrowed inspiration. The internet was a haven for culture, to seek comfort outside of oneself and invite stories into psychic reality. There is an intimacy in people and places I knew from all the time I spent with them inside my head. I made the fiction real on my terms: I designed photo edits for engagement and posted stories with comments. The anonymity granted me respite from gossip and recognition. I found a simple pride in creating for strangers. Something I made mattered to people other than myself, and I craved that rush of validation; I didn’t know where else to find it. It was like someone was paying attention.
If I could reach out and touch it, I’d pull back and see my fingerprints all over it too.
I can hear her voice in my head. The narrator who monologues with the authority of a wiser self; the soft and serene voiceover of a semi-autobiographical film. She told me to romanticize my life in the pith of unremarkableness. She says things like “pay attention to the way you feel/do/think this,” as if others are watching; keeps going even though I know they’re not. She insists that ordinary moments feel grand, and carefully threads them together in a character arc about who I am and who I will become.
A small footnote: I never asked where she came from. I imagine it’s from the self-reported 140-character statuses that describe every little thing I do in sensationalized detail. Or the artistic flair of caption-writing when my photo post was worth a thousand words but needed a few more witty ones. From the very beginning, she was the judge and the curator. My profile is her name, bio, and likes.
Sometimes I wonder if she’ll ever shut up. Most of the time I know I’d be lost without her.
I spent most of 2020 languishing in my childhood bedroom. A sudden series of pandemic events broke reality and brought me back to the place I began. There was nobody to visit and nowhere to go (and nothing to do aside from bake focaccia; paint watercolors; adopt plants; repeat), so I retreated inward. I filled my time online, the way I used to do with the limitless hours of my younger years.
Once again, the world was outside and I was at home.
The internet was the only thing that mattered, and maybe the only thing I still had. The people I cared about compressed themselves to fit inside tiny boxes on a video call; calls were the only way I could reach them, and even that wasn’t close enough anymore. I took classes online and obsessively followed the news, and where there was truly nothing left I could cook or craft, I watched more television. Still living in someone else’s universe. I was an early adult idle, ambling through my postgraduate years from a laptop screen. The teen idles were once like that too.
I retraced my digital footsteps. My muscle memory led me through old habits and haunting grounds I hadn’t visited since high school; through YouTube rabbit holes, sentimental blog entries, and young adult novels I had long aged out of. I made a playlist of my favorite songs from the era; although they weren’t my favorites when I first heard them, they swallowed me in a certain tenderness.
It was achingly familiar. I’d been here for a while, yet this was the first time I properly took in my surroundings. Nostalgia found me in my hiding place. Lured me out and held up a mirror to show me how little I had changed. Emotional vertigo.
My coming of age has come and gone in cyberspace. Perspective constricts in a childhood bedroom. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to see. Me with the same desk and posters and twin bed; and me with the phone on an infinite scroll. I’ve been wired through the internet, cables that criss-cross my time in the physical world and my attention on the digital web.
The internet explodes reality, and that reality is cyclonic. Sucks you in, spins you around; engulfs your senses in madness and misery and magic.
They’d ask me why I didn’t go outside and see the world—and I’d respond that the world was right there in the palm of my hand.
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