screw being a preteen in 2013 . fr

i am literally just word vomiting here ok dont listen to anything i say i am having a giggle with myself

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gen think i was born in the most awful horrible year / age group . 2001 i am not happy with you!!!!! or maybe it's just how i grew up.

 ignoring the obvious of never getting a proper school send off bc covid happened (still feel awfully sick thinking about it). never got chance to say a real goodbye to people i had been seeing every day for the past 7 years. just an announcement of "hey - this is your last day of school ever tomorrow good luck". as preteens i feel like we had such a strange strange experience.

but there is so much more that it feels i missed out on. ??? or that every milestone people around my age went through was somewhat muted in some way. 

• strange in between technology age
  
  , i was not conscious enough to really understand and appreciate any of the cool techy stuff that was happening when i was growing up. yeah i had a wii and yeah i loved the wii, but i never actually used the wii. i messed around with the wii making god awful ugly miis and playing games like mario kart and animal crossing in the most heinous ways.
  i got my first digital camera for christmas 2008 (my 7th birthday) and i used it all the time, but that's not really that exciting or unique. 
  
  my first phone was a little samsung galaxy ace that had about enough room for 20 songs (if i was lucky) and 2 games. no front camera, little to no app support, at the time where you had no data in your contract, 500 texts. i got it on the cusp of smartphones actually working well - that little phone was not built to last at all. it promised too much and too little all at once. 
  
  
  
• the opposite of an endearing online presence 
  
  , always felt like people a few years older or a few years younger have real generational online spaces and identities (older/myspace & classic facebook. younger/tiktok & instagram in its prime). 
  when i started secondary school it was in the in between days of half the people you knew having little slow hand me down early touchscreen phones that hardly ran & the other half being treated to the fanciest devlces known to 11 year olds (the iphone 4).
  
  snapchat was in its infancy. instagram was in the era of opening it and taking photo with the in-app camera and adding a 'retro' filter. but there was no community. group chats in apps like that didn't exist, the best thing we had was skype. everyone around you at school knew about facebook and instagram but no one was using it - you had to have an account to be 'cool' but nothing that my age group was posting meant anything.
  felt like we were just stuck in this transitional period of things being weird and unpolished, but in a way that was definitely not exciting.
  
  

• when are virtual worlds 'too childish' ??
  
  , competing with social media as a preteen from 2012-2014 were online worlds. moviestarplanet, club penguin, stardoll, moshi monsters. as soon as u made the jump from primary school to secondary these spaces became this weird cringey thing to say you used. and i really did play moviestarplanet all the time (i still do i never moved on). there was no way anyone was catching me being open about playing that game at all after i turned 12. it wasn't something you could talk to the girl you sat next to at school about, because it wasn't cool. we were trying so hard to be grown at a time and under circumstances where it was almost impossible to keep up with things. no ones phone was running instagram unless you were rich and fancy. 
  
  the most fun i ever had online when i was a preteen was on the family laptop - that's all i had, and all the majority of my friends had. i dont understand how we moved on from them so quickly. it was just the time i guess.
  
  
  
• online fandom for the first time
  
  , we did have the prime of one direction, 5sos, taylor swift - i'll give us that. and it was a reallt interesting time to be exploring the online world for the first time. my dad upgraded his phone in 2014 and i used to sneakily use his old iPhone 4 to run a 5sos instagram account. for the first time i was truly involved in something in an online space that felt my own, it felt fun and exciting. but it was strange. sending ig dm's involved a new photo every day and sending to everyone u wanted to speak to about that one topic -  and finding an actual group of friends online was so difficult. someone forgets to include you in the list of people to send the new dm photo to one single time? it was nice knowing you, you'll probably never hear from them again.
  
  i remember using websites that would pool together a selection of hashtags to paste in your captions for 'exposure' - follow4follow and that kind of stuff. but you had to be careful actually looking at some of them bc of course it was full of corn. i had no idea what i was really getting into at 12 years old clicking hashtag woah. it was a dangerous game you played, be instagram famous with 1000 followers in 2014 but with a chance of seeing nudity and violence all while just trying to interact with a band singing about things that make you beautiful. what are search safety filters?????
  
  also, we really were just limited to instagram. other sites had their established communities already. everyone you met was older than you were, it was so embarrassing to be that young online at the time but everyone was online. your peers were saying this is where you need to be, what you need to be doing, but online spaces never wanted you there. 2013 liminal space.
  
  
  
• simply growing up / puberty
  
  , for the first time people had a camera on them at every second. everyone at school, everyone you would meet with at a weekend in town. what a novelty! you've got to make sure you post at least 5 times to your snapchat story every day and maybe twice to instagram - everyone needs to see what 12 year old you is doing at all times !!!! but puberty is doing things to me that its not really doing to everyone else yet, they're getting periods and developing - i'm just getting severe acne. SNAP.
  
  now picture this, the only people you ever saw putting on makeup was your mum, someone older that you lived with or the sparkly new 'youtubers' like zoella. and you know people aren't really meant to have acne and pimples, it's never in the media you consume on the telly unless its labeled 'the end of the world'. makeup can cover it but... its not really accessible or usual for an 11 year old to be using thick concealer. but it's there. it's not going anywhere & everyone around you is still busy taking pictures of everyone and everything they can to post online instantly, no regard for safety or privacy or consent. it's a special kind of hell. no escape (not until you're really a teen)
  

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dont really know what ive been saying, just a lot of things that i think back on and am like ... huh. weird time for me and everyone i know (especially online). and ik social media was always a 13+ space, at the time and now, but it was just such a strange strange time to be that age.