I often wonder who I might have been if I hadn’t come of age with the internet. Pretending, for a second, that many of my most cherished relationships aren’t owed to that very fact, I wonder what my relationships might have looked like in that alternate reality.
I am old enough to remember a world before everyone carried the internet in their pockets, but young enough that I was building websites in elementary school.
(Also young enough that the headaches I gave my parents as a 10 year old involved getting our AOL account suspended because I kept violating the TOS by emailing my ~*zines*~ to my hundreds of fellow nerdy tween subscribers.)
Subtracting the internet from my life is an absurd counterfactual, but to whatever degree it is possible, it’s fair to conclude that I am an infinitely more private person without the internet. This is an easy conclusion to draw; most of us probably are.
When I feel things, talking to anyone else about it is often my last instinct. I write them. I feel them first, of course. I think about them, write about them, and then I keep on thinking and writing. And it is only after I’ve gone through enough cycles of thinking and writing that I can even begin to do any sort of talking.
But Growing Up Internet has meant that dialogue has been inserted at peculiar intervals in that cycle, in ways so second nature that the implications often went overlooked.
There is an inevitable blurring of the lines between the public Writing About My Life and the private Writing Through My Feelings, particularly when writing and publishing with any real frequency. If I haven’t externally lived another good story since Tuesday, then I guess I’ll have to talk about the grand epic that’s been playing out in my inner life, because I could clear 1000 words easy just on the shit that’s happened since breakfast.
The “publish” stage got introduced to the cycle of feeling, thinking, and writing when I was a pre-teen, and it took another 15 years for me to start really thinking about what that even meant.
Even now, I’m still in the cycle. This is me writing through it. I’ll probably still be writing my way through it for some time.
One essential consequence is that “publish” was a way to escape the cycle, at least for a little while. If I could externalize the issue, then I could mentally walk away from it, at least in the short term.
This has had weird consequences for my offline life.
For me, “publish” often means that I am ready to get some distance from something that I have been mentally and emotionally drowning in. For people who know me, it’s the first they’re hearing of this thing.
When I am sharing something difficult, I am saying that I was drowning in this feeling, but by hitting publish, I’m reaching for dry land. I’m ready to walk away from the water for a little while.
What my loved ones hear is, “I’ve been drowning and I never told you. I’ve been drowning and you didn’t see.”
Even when it’s something less dramatic, less drowning and more swimming, there’s a divide between my “look at this water I’m leaving behind” and everyone else’s “wait, where did all this water come from?”
In my younger years I had online diaries where I shared every terrible, fleeting thought that I had about everyone and everything. It wasn’t pretty. When I started this blog where I was going to attach my name to what I was writing, there were some early lessons in remembering whose stories were mine to tell.
But I don’t think I ever fully appreciated the degree to which my personal cycle of isolated processing and seemingly abrupt sharing became part of the stories of everyone around me.
Which is funny, or maybe just selfish and sad, because I have also seen how acutely the struggles of my loved ones have shaped me.
I managed this all much better when I was doing this thing more regularly. I had constant access to that exit from thoughts that got to be too much, but because they were surrounded by tales of frivolity, it didn’t feel like a space of doom and gloom. It was also steadier for everyone else; when I showed off a new pond of absurd thinking every week, the water was never so shocking.
Shouting things into the internet void is the only good exit I have ever built myself from the onslaught of thoughts that would swallow me whole.
Maybe in some alternate reality I am someone who is well adjusted, who was forced to learn to talk about her feelings at a young age.
It seems more likely to me, though, that this internet-less alternate reality version of me just got swallowed instead.