my connection to the internet (crosspost)

crosspost from my tumblr

ever since i was a little girl, i used the internet to express myself.. dress up games to tumblr, all of it, was used as an outlet. my earliest memory was playing dressup doll games on the computer & watching clips of lucky star in 240p quality while listening to vocaloid in my living room as a small small child, of course, my mom was cooking dinner during all of this, so i can smell dinner when i think of that memory.. germany, 8 pm, shes making banana pudding & tuna sandwiches for me and her while my dad is working.. its such a sweet thing to think of now that i come to think about it..♪(´▽｀) way before i discovered the bitterness of the world, the world to me was just schnuffel bunny & vocaloid..

i never had many friends growing up. i had maybe three actual friends IRL, i was severely bullied before going on to become homeschooled from third grade all the way up to highschool, which i went on to do online schooling for that aswell because quite frankly, i was terrified of leaving my house due to my increasing social anxiety along with quarantine happening about ~2 years into my school life. anyways, thats enough backstory, back to my main point.

anywho, i've been expressing myself online for a LONG time as you can tell, i first began uploading my animations and artwork to youtube in 2016..? and i went on to upload my music to soundcloud in 2018. i made a lot of online friends, and even had a partner who i met online which lasted around 4 years. which doesnt sound impressive until i tell you, we began dating in MIDDLE SCHOOL! we dated all the way until.. i was almost 16? lol..

the internet was my refuge and escape from various traumas that had happened to me over the course of the past few years, traumas i was too scared to go to therapy or even open up for, so i'd express my pain on anonymous accounts and abandon them later on. i have countless deviantart accounts that i used purely for vent art and nothing else, that i would later abandon once i realized people could probably tell it was me.

darkness aside, i have many good memories involving uploading my work online aswell, from my various soundcloud aliases to my various artist aliases, one of which would become extremely successful due to my original characters when i was 14, i later abandoned this alias for safety reasons that i won't get into here.. along with all of the fanfiction i read and wrote when i was 12.. so.. much.. fanfiction.. specifically bandom fanfiction, do you all remember bandom?? bandom was a nice time on the internet, we were all just having so much fun on those "___ is ____'s song" and "bandomconfessions" accounts.. no fear of judgement or anything, we could just write stories where we dated our favorite band member and others thought it was the coolest thing to ever grace this planet..

i feel like, without the internet i wouldnt be who i am today, okay, i will admit, i went through some edgy phases to try to fit in with the cishet white kids online since.. being me online was hard! i had to participate in edginess or else run the risk of being called heinous.. heinous things. i was a huge leafyishere fan (now that i think about it.. ew!) and frequented boards of 4chan that i'd never frequent now that i'm older and you know.. have a soul that isnt as dark as the void?

i feel like. . . . if i didnt have the internet at the age i did, i wouldnt had discovered stuff that was lifechanging to me, for example GTBSG was just purely by chance, 10 year old me poking around on soundcloud, youtube, tumblr and twitter, just looking for something, anything new to stimulate my little senses.. and i found it! that group literally and figuratively changed my life in the best sense possible. i feel like i found my calling through their music.

i think that.. no matter how bad and judgemental the internet gets, it'll always be important to me, like yeah, i hate how social media operates nowadays, and all the microtrends that results in so much waste and landfills getting bigger, but if you focus on yourself, delete tiktok, stop doomscrolling, the internet is fun, once you go back to putting in the effort to find new websites, to read peoples personal pages and shrines.. the internet feels a lot more alive again. the internet was taken over by corporations but theres people trying to take it back, even if its a vocal minority, we're still here, and those people who put in the effort mean more to me than they'll ever know.. o(*￣▽￣*)o

i love you internet, even if you suck sometimes.