This is my stop

Let me off this train pls

Hello World!

16 years ago, I stumbled upon a fan forum for a favorite video game of my youth. I joined and became obsessed. I spent hours upon hours of weeknights and weekends and summer sunrises online. I found refuge in an online world when irl adolescence was turbulent and painful. I have many stories I’ve wanted to tell about this era of my life, and I started to.

I started writing a zine that I planned to complete in November about my time online in the 2000s. As I started writing, something in me fell apart. From the eyes of a now 27 year old woman, I reread the old chat logs of my 12-14 year old self. I had read through them once or twice in my early 20s to reminisce, but now at this older age, also knowing that I’d be sharing some of the contents with a large audience, it took on a new light. I revisited how hopelessly devoted, absolutely infatuated I was with a man 10 years older than me who ran the forum, who I considered my hero. I reviewed the oddities of our dynamic in those messages and after an initial feeling of nostalgic warmth, it lost all its romantic grandeur.

I felt something inside of me give way to a barren, cold emptiness. I spent about two or three weeks thrown back into the psyche of that young girl. I wasn’t sleeping well or thinking clearly. I poured words into documents and wept in my kitchen at 1am wishing I could talk to him as an adult and hear his perspective, so I could convince myself it was never bad. It was unique and special. I wanted the softness back. I wanted the belief that I had a hero, a savior, a person who defied convention who carried me through one of the hardest times in my life.

I did not want to see what was so obvious. This man was not my hero. He was at best a socially misguided young man from a completely different political landscape trailblazing an early internet empire in the digital Wild West of the early aughts, at worst a predatory creep who liked the ego boost and power of little girls fawning over him. And either way, his presence in my life, his creation’s presence in my life, was a symptom of my own deep pain, loneliness, and poor coping skills to deal with my (overused phrase these days, but I really mean it) developmental trauma. I was now, after all this time, seeing how my love affair with the internet was frankly never good for me. Yes, I learned a lot and met interesting people. But at the end of the day, it was an addiction and an escape. It was dissociation with an extroverted twist.

I tried to keep writing about the 2000s internet. I bought a book of essays about the topic and couldn’t get through it all. I felt off. Then I decided to take a break to try and regain composure. Then I tried writing about my thoughts on the present day internet, a topic I’ve been extremely passionate about…forever, I guess. I wrote about it, the usual spiels about corporate marketing media incentivizing cancel culture blah blah blah. Then this past week I was interviewed for the podcast Fucking Cancelled and I was asked to dream big about what I want social media to look like, and I couldn’t come up with anything. I felt like I had no words left and could not articulate a damn thing. It suddenly felt like a hollowed out topic. What I wanted to say is that, honestly, I don’t think it’s worth dreaming about anymore. I simply cannot see how to make an online space in this economic context that won’t become an instrument of manipulation, surveillance, and anti-human impulse. We will never return to the internet of the 2000s, and now after working on that project, I see how even that went awry. I can’t think of what’s good enough and I don’t have the technical or financial expertise to imagine what could be possible anyway.

Over the last year I’ve gained a small following in Instagram. Probably that’s why you’re reading this right now. Building that audience, posting and posting and posting, DMing and group chatting, getting harassed, receiving support, losing sleep over it all—it was the most mentally unhealthy I’ve been since getting stable on psych meds. I was online constantly. It was a great way to, wouldn’t you know, escape from the bleak life I was leading in a dead-end job, socially isolated due to the pandemic, and spiritually depleted.

I am genuinely proud of what I’ve created online over the last year. I loved my Out of the Woods podcast and I’m sad that I stopped making new episodes, but after getting harassed I no longer felt it was responsible for me to host a podcast interviewing people about a vulnerable topic, as it put them in the line of fire. I have written essays I feel very proud of. I have a lot more that I’ve started and stopped and would one day like to finish. It is extremely crazy and means more than I can say to know I helped anyone. It’s bonkers that my general resentment and burning desires for speaking the obvious truth about our culture drove me to be so uninhibited and impassioned that I could write shit that helped others feel heard, relieved, renewed, and empowered to say what they truly believe. I feel amazed to think that I can say I played even a minor role in shifting discourse and cutting through any of the scrupulous tension that has held so many of us back from speaking our minds honestly.

I started a new job about 3 weeks ago after being unemployed since the end of April. This job was unexpected and fortuitous in that it kind of just fell into my lap at exactly the right time. It has been both extraordinarily meaningful and extremely challenging only in these last 3 weeks. Unsurprisingly and bizarrely, week one I found myself thrown into a debacle with political dynamics virtually identical what I have written about and criticized over the last year. Weird stuff.

Now that I’m working in this job, doing work I’ve wanted to do since I was that young 12 year old girl online all those years ago, I do not care about the internet. And when I have cared about the internet over the last few weeks, it’s when I’m stressed out or emotionally activated about something at work. I use the internet to cope and escape. It’s futile and unhealthy. I don’t believe this is the case for everyone, but it is for me, and what is overwhelmingly clear is that it has been that way for at least 16 long years.

I don’t want to do this anymore. I scroll through Instagram and I just can’t bring myself to care about the discourse anymore. I can barely stand to think about it. I still love the work my friends are doing online and believe in their brilliance, integrity and creativity. But the politics is so disconnected from what I’m doing in real life. And I want to be in real life. I don’t want social media. I don’t want algorithms. I don’t want forums. I want a life that is vibrant and alive. When I use the internet I am dissociated, resentful and isolated, because my relationship to it was born of escapism and addiction, and that relationship has not advanced as much as I thought.

I still want to write, but I don’t want to keep trying (and inevitably failing) to commit to being a personality or presence online anymore. I don’t want to box myself into the tone and flow of social media, fighting against the siren song of virality. It is an extreme distraction from seeing reality clearly.

I am 27 and time is ticking away. With this job I see a potential future for myself. I don’t feel this desperate hopelessness when I look ahead now. I want to write about my big ideas, but when I ask myself now what drives me to want to publish my hot takes on for example how profoundly misguided the fat acceptance movement is—the impulse that keeps that drive revving even after I’ve concluded it isn’t worth the disruption to my stability basically amounts to “because I’m right and I want to be the one to say what everyone else is thinking but too afraid to say.” That’s a pretty flimsy reason to do anything, even if it is true that I am right (which I am).

It should come as no surprise that I have once again found myself falling into yet another a crisis of faith after a personal zealous period in the pursuit of truth and freedom. That was my whole origin story into The Discourse after all, and we humans are nothing if not patterned creatures. So off I go again, realizing I still need to work on that little zealotry problem I’ve got.

With that, I say farewell until it makes sense to be putting out writing again. I will be back with my big ideas in time. Knowing me it’ll be in 2 weeks and I’ll dump like 3 essays all at once. I’m a master of fits and starts. My project about the 00s internet will be completed one day when I have done more internal processing about it, when the time is right and I can recount the stories with the right mindset. I’m looking forward to when it can see the light of day, because I have some wild and wacky stories I’m excited to share.

Thank you my friends for being here. I’ll talk to you again!

*title and subtitle are an inside joke to myself about how me achieving a small following on Instagram would have fulfilled my MySpace scene queen dream of being on VIP MySpace trains, and now I wanna get off the train ha ha ha