Losing Myself Online

a history of being insane on the internet

Like so many other millennials, my internet addiction began in 2002 via dial-up connection. My sister, then in her 20’s, had given us her old PC and set me up with an AIM screen name: acheer706. This was generated from inputting my name, hobby (cheerleading lol), birthday, and graduation year. My preferred screen name, alliewalliebeanbutton, was already taken. My sister urged me to type out full, correctly spelled words and sentences when chatting with friends instead of just saying “hay wuts ^” to everyone, and then she warned me to never, ever under any circumstances enter a chat room.

The computer lived in my parents’ bedroom. They’d held out on getting one until it had become absolutely necessary (schools were starting to require typed papers, among other reasons). My dad was one of those dads who went around saying things like, “TV rots your brain” and “sitting down makes you fat.” He was deeply opposed to anything technology-related, especially if it involved physical idleness (shotguns and BB guns were OK technology). The idea of his kids spending hours each day in front of a screen was his worst nightmare.

Now that we use the phrase screen time to moderate this very activity, I can admit he might have been on to something. Perhaps sitting in front of a screen typing “ttyl lyl” a hundred times a day paved the way for brain rot and sociopathy in me. Within days of the computer being in our house, I was addicted. All my friends were on AIM. I was shy, and it gave me the confidence to talk to peers (boys) I otherwise felt intimidated by. I had several screen names, some with impersonated identities. I guessed the password to my crush’s screen name. I came home from school every day and went straight to the computer. This deeply troubled my parents, and they tried to impose time limits, which I managed to constantly evade. I don’t know how they ever made a phone call. The dial-up connection didn’t last long, and they quickly gave in to a cable modem.

There were more ways for me to waste time online than just being on AIM. I’d take quizzes on seventeen.com and spend hours testing fonts, crafting profile quotes, and choosing buddy icons. Like the rest of eighth grade, I was a regular on eBaum’s world. I also tried on multiple occasions to guess Johnny Depp’s and Leonardo DiCaprio’s email addresses by shooting off emails to combinations that *could* be theirs (ldicaprio@yahoo.com, 90sjohnny@earthlink.net). I wrote long-winded confessionals to my cousins and forwarded email chains. It probably wasn’t great for me to spend all that time on the computer, but this version of the internet is the one I miss: the purity of comic sans and haphazard web design. A lot has been written about this era, and many have attempted to resurrect it by building online communities like Perfectly Imperfect. I subscribe to Perfectly Imperfect myself, and while I enjoy it, I rarely open it because I’m still too distracted by Instagram.

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When I started high school, my parents moved the computer from their bedroom to the kitchen, where it became an accessory to my eating disorder. This is where I discovered Xanga, which began innocently at first — all my friends had it! — until I found the “pro-ana” and “pro-mia” blog rings. Eventually my parents could point to these as evidence that the internet was inherently bad for me, and toxic. While this content certainly hastened my path to a full-blown eating disorder, I think I would have arrived there regardless. I’ve been obsessed with food and my body since I was a child, and bulimia is a contagion that can be picked up anywhere.

I’d argue that the blogs also gave me a space to name the problem and connect with others who were suffering. As Emmeline Clein writes in Dead Weight, “…it makes a paradoxical, perverse kind of sense for the pro-ED internet to serve as a harm-reduction function in a society where beauty standards demand violence against the self.”¹ When I think about the harm I’ve come by through the internet, the pro-ana community isn’t at the forefront of my mind.

If my eating disorder started with the act of scrutinizing my image in the mirror, the fanaticism around controlling that image started with social media. It provided an infinitum of mirrors to scrutinize myself from; I had the feeling that my soul existed not just in my body but in every public image of me. If those images didn’t align with how I thought I should look — based on photos of thin, pretty girls both in media and on pro-Ana boards — then I didn’t want to exist. I learned to model my existence around how I thought I should look. As Clein states a few chapters earlier in her book, “the internet is where I learned to ignore context.”²

I want to say that Facebook is where I started sharing photos online, but now I’m remembering that before Facebook, teens were sharing photo albums on websites like Photo Bucket and Flickr. My friends and I would take photos of ourselves with digital cameras, plug them into our family computers, upload the photos to one of these websites, and share the links in our AIM profiles. Before Facebook, AIM was still the center of social connection online — even if you had a Myspace, Xanga, or Livejournal, friends were directed to those profiles through AIM. Many people also made friends independently through Myspace and blogging platforms, and may have incorporated those friends into their AIM buddy lists. For most people I knew, AIM was the bridge between someone’s online and in-person life. I think it may have also provided a separation between online and in-person identities that was lost in later years.

Some of my friends were on Myspace, and so was I, but I barely used it. Only the emo kids really used it, and although I wanted to be emo, I wasn’t. I definitely ended up consuming a lot of the music that Myspace proliferated, but I actually found more of the niche artists I liked (Saosin, Underoath, Azure Ray) through Xanga. I didn’t use Myspace much because I wasn’t allowed to be outwardly alternative — I was a prep (barf), a rule follower, and a cheerleader with perhaps a secret dark side. It wasn’t until Facebook emerged that the preps, jocks, and basic bitches fully got online.

Between 2005 - 2008, Facebook eventually replaced AIM as a central hub of online communication for teens and college students. This is, at least, how I remember it. Taylor Lorenz goes into great depth on early online culture and the rise of Facebook and Instagram in her book, Extremely Online (recommended reading for anyone who came of age on the internet). Unlike AIM, Facebook was image-based. Although I’d already been exchanging photos with friends online, it wasn’t until Facebook came along that I became a sociopath about it. The summer of 2005, before my junior year in high school, I learned about Facebook from my best friend, whose boyfriend was going to be a freshman in college. He and his friends, the previous year’s senior boys, had just joined Facebook. Only college students were allowed on the platform at that time, but my friend’s boyfriend let us log into his account, which allowed us to look at the profiles of boys we’d had crushes on as well as their girlfriends, whom we’d idolized. It gave us new access to them; suddenly we could see the photos they were sharing and what they wrote on each other’s “walls”. It became something of an obsession. Only a few months later, Facebook allowed high school students to join, too, and soon all my friends and I had our own profiles that we obsessed over.

Facebook was where I learned how to present myself online in a very specific, targeted way. Although we all still used AIM to chat, Facebook was where we uploaded photos of ourselves. Girls inherently knew to only post flattering photos of one another, and my friends and I took turns uploading and tagging albums from the weekends. We created bizarre groups and wrote nonsense on each other’s walls. Homecoming, prom, and other formal dance photos were anxiously awaited to be shared on Facebook. The vibe there was silly, fun, wholesome, and jealous. You might find out that your friends had hung out without you.

I once uploaded a profile picture to Facebook that my best friend said was “too emo,” and immediately changed it to a photo with a teeth-baring smile. I also knew that Facebook was the only place where I was visible to my crush, a boy two years older than me. Looking back, it definitely feels weird that college boys were friends with high school girls on Facebook. By the end of high school, my ex and I (a different boy) were using Facebook as a weapon against each other. He blocked me, and then I forced our mutual friends to post thirst traps of me so he would still see them. In college, it continued to be a place to see and be seen, and my friends and I used and abused it religiously. This is where the concept of jealousy pics was born.

Instagram was a far more efficient way to post jealousy pics than Facebook. I resisted it at first; I didn’t even have an iPhone until mid-2013. Of course, it became more appealing to me when I realized I could use it as a tool to get attention from an ex I’d been in a band with, who had started bringing other girls to our shows. He had Instagram, and so did some of my friends, and luckily they all followed each other. I regularly asked my friends to post hot pictures of me on their accounts so he would see them.

My parents gave me an iPod touch for Christmas that year, and I started dating this guy I’d gone to high school with. We hadn’t spoken much in high school, but we had both moved to New York after college. In high school I’d found him gorgeous and intimidating, and when I learned he also lived in New York, I sent him a Facebook invite to a show (because I was still in a band). He actually came, which was shocking, and we started dating soon after. I’d been crazy over men before, but I was crazy about this man beyond all previous experience. He was also very much on Instagram, and made an account for me on my iPod touch, which I barely used. We were blissfully happy, I thought, for a few months — until he found out I was still bulimic and also caught me doing coke with his roommate’s girlfriend. The breakup shattered me, and since we were only 23 and 24 years old, we both handled it terribly.

I suddenly became glued to Instagram, constantly searching for WiFi in public so I could look at his profile on my iPod touch. I posted jealousy pics, and made my friends post them, too, because he followed all of them. This drove everyone insane. I was addicted to tracking all his likes (back when this is something IG had the capability to do) and became distraught any time he liked another girl’s photo. There were five or six girls I was convinced he was dating. He deleted his Facebook because I kept getting upset about the photos he was tagged in, and then I deleted my Instagram to get back at him. I smashed a very beautiful glass butterfly he had given me for Valentine’s day and blocked his number to prove that I was done. A couple days later, an iMessage came through on my computer: did you change your number? tried to call you :/ and ig is gone?

I went maybe a day without Instagram before I caved and made a new account, mostly so that I could continue scrutinizing his activity. I went to a see a psychic to figure out how to get him back, and she told me, “there is a body of water and the letter M standing between the two of you.” A few weeks later, I opened his Instagram profile to find that he’d posted a photo of a new girl, a blonde. Her name started with the letter “M”. I lost my mind. Some of my friends tried to reassure me that just because he’d posted a photo of her didn’t mean they were together, and I wanted to believe them, but couldn’t. Her profile was private, however, so I couldn’t confirm anything. It tortured me.

Finally, I got an iPhone, but the apparatus didn’t matter by that point. I checked this girl’s profile multiple times a day to see if her profile was still private. Once I came home from work and spent six hours googling her, finding her Facebook page and some other old online profiles, and still finding out nothing except that she was from Long Island (could this have been the water the psychic referred to?). I never stopped talking about it, and never stopped crying. I couldn’t sleep or eat. Sometimes I’d walk from my job in Midtown back home to Crown Heights, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and lie on the floor until night fell. I got blackout drunk regularly.

Only about a month went by before my ex started texting me again, and texting me in such a way that I thought he couldn’t possibly be seeing anyone else. This brought me back to life. He didn’t post any more photos of the other girl, and I thought it was only a matter of days before we’d get back together. Then, one afternoon when I was bored, I went to her profile. She’d made it public, and there were photos of them together dating back to like, a few weeks after we’d broken up. I felt so stupid, and told him we shouldn’t speak anymore.

I still looked at his Instagram, and hers. I had a new account which he didn’t follow me on, but it was public, and I posted as if I knew he’d see it. I ended up becoming totally infatuated with his girlfriend’s Instagram. When they broke up, it was apparent by the way she was posting — mostly thirst traps, and no more pictures of him. By this point I knew who her friends were, had frequented their Instagram accounts, and knew the names of her two cats. I knew the name of her best friend’s cat. I have no idea if this girl, M, ever knew who I was. I still think about her and dream about her sometimes. A few months ago, when I was visiting New York, I saw her in person for the first time at a bodega in Fort Greene. It had been over ten years since either of us had dated our ex. I don’t know if she saw me or not.

This ex and I slept together a few times in the decade after we broke up. He followed my new account. I cheated with him in one relationship, and almost again in another. When I say I couldn’t quit this man, I mean it was a disease. At some point, we agreed we could just be friends, which was probably a lie on my part. The last time I saw or spoke to him was in 2017, when I went with him to buy a plant for his new apartment. Now he’s married, and still watches all my Instagram stories. All of my exes do, actually. I know this doesn’t mean anything, but it feels haunting. I hope none of them read this.

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I’ve had a couple serious relationships and like, five situationships since being with the man who got me hooked on Instagram. I know it’s not fair to say he got me hooked. I already had a problematic relationship with social media. I’ve followed the exact same pattern of hyper-vigilance with everyone I’ve dated, even before Instagram existed, when there was just Facebook. It’s something everyone I know has engaged in. Even the sanest, most disciplined people I know have done this, which I actually find really remarkable. I swear to God the Pope has done it. It would be so stupid and reductive to conclude this with, “social media is bad, the internet is bad.” It’s not inherently bad. People, perhaps, use it badly (me), and I wonder what it’s done to us all long-term. The way social media intersects with ego, identity, and vanity makes us incredibly irresponsible. And it’s too fascinating not to participate in.

I tried to deactivate my Instagram recently. Shockingly, having nothing to do with a man; it’s just been making me feel really bad about myself. I hate finding out that I’m insane on Instagram even without the influence of a crush or break-up. I’d been posting a lot of stories and then deleting them. I couldn’t keep track anymore of who I wanted to view my stories and who I didn’t. I was hiding my mom from my stories, and then unhiding her because I felt bad, and then hiding her again because there was something I didn’t want her to see. I felt like my identity there had become a total wreck, and it disgusted me, so I wanted to disappear.

More than that, I was simply spending way too much time on Instagram. I mean really, it was sick and abhorrent, and most of that time was spent scrolling aimlessly through the explore page. I’d catch myself doing it and sort of watch from above as my inert self took in the stupidest content in the world — most of it diet or exercise related. Instagram was constantly serving me imagery of thin women’s bodies that looked how my own body used to look at its sickest. It was both seductive and antagonistic, and I found myself thinking, what if I just started cutting out xyz from my diet? What if I just started running again? A few years ago I probably would have done just that, but now it felt scary, and I was losing hours a day to it. The only way to make it stop was to deactivate. I still kept my finsta because I couldn’t bear losing my favorite chats, but the algorithm for that account is far less sadistic.

This worked for maybe a week, until I recorded myself singing Defying Gravity and decided it needed to be seen by everyone. I’m very much engaging in the same behavior as before, with some slight improvement. I do think it helped to have even just a short break from the algorithm; I feel more immune to it now. But it’s not great. It’s not ideal. I still spend too much time on Instagram, far more than I’d like to. I find myself dealing with it the same way I deal with my eating disorder, using a harm reduction approach. For better or worse, the internet has become much more like food than like drugs or alcohol. It’s impossible to turn your back on completely.

Being online has made me feel both deliriously happy and intensely lonely. Happy in my consumption of memes and viral phenomena, in exchanges with friends, in connections I’ve made. Lonely when I use it in a voyeuristic manner, watching other people engage in life while I sit frozen in place. I want to say the good outweighs the bad. I think it does. I don’t know if I’ll still feel that way in a couple decades, when we’ve all lost ourselves completely.

Anyways, I can’t believe I’m going to publish this! How fucking embarrassing!

sick, sad, and 24

1. pg. 148, Dead Weight, from the chapter, “Starving in the Cyberverse”

2. pg. 58, Dead Weight, from the chapter, “Red Virgin, Red Heifer”