Dear Reader, this is why I'm here.
I'm from the generation that didn't have the internet when we were children. My exposure to computers was playing Oregon Trail. The original. On a computer monitor larger than the TV in my parent's bedroom. We only had access to the school's computer once per week, and only if we behaved, so Oregon Trail Day was a really big deal to us.
My first exposure to the internet was at my aunt's home out-of-state. Whenever we would visit, I got to stay in the computer room, and chat away in the AOL chatroom. Me, normally the outcast at school, tucked away on a playground bench, nose stuck in a VC Andrews, Stephen King, or One Last Wish novel, suddenly had friends and people to talk to. People who also loved ST:TNG and seaQuest, who also fell asleep to old time radio shows, and who I felt more connected to than anyone in my real world. I only got to visit my aunt a few times per year, but those visits sustained me for the loneliness I felt back home.
I didn't have "my own" page on the internet until I was in college. No, not Facebook. It didn't exist yet. It was a LiveJournal. At the end of every day, I'd pour my heart out into the abyss, and slowly found a community of others doing the same. (I shudder to think of some of the things I put into words back then) It really was a journal for all of us, filled with the things we couldn't share with our in-person friends. And unlike the little locked books of my childhood, this journal actually spoke back. Friends gave me advice, laughs, affirmations and, occasionally, the reality check that I so desperately needed.
It sounds absurd, but in that timeline, we didn't worry about things like being doxxed, or things we said online harming us in real life. We didn't think about employers regularly searching the web to see a candidate's social media presence before they hire them. We didn't think about our future date plugging our name into a search engine to learn our story long before we met in person. We were naive, but in some ways I think it made us more honest.
This was our opportunity to truly be ourselves, to toss our realities into the abyss, casting it into the sea, or creating the person we wished we could be, and walking through a glimpse of "what if?".
Facebook came around right about as I was graduating college. I opened my account back when you had to have an .edu address to join, and I remember thinking I'd made it in just under the wire. For awhile it was fun, tossing sheep at one another (you had to be there), and hearing news from all of your family and friends on a daily basis. This is when, I think, I noticed the reality I try to create online blending into the reality of my lived experience. I don't think I was alone.
I posted pictures of the joyful moments, like sunflowers on a road trip, with a cutesy caption like 'Road trippin' Life!' (yes, I was that lame). I didn't post that the night before, I'd been speeding near that same road with a person in anaphylactic shock in the backseat, rushing to the hospital. I posted a picture of cup of tea on the table near my laptop, raving about how much I'd gotten written that day. In reality, my mother was on hospice, I hadn't slept in 36 hours, and I'd just remembered I'd poured the cup of tea hours before and it was cold.
I carefully crafted the story I was telling, and stopped being honest. Sometime later, my handwritten journals started telling the false reality as well. Writing the truth felt foreign. I didn't want any evidence, anywhere, that could betray just how imperfect my life was, and how much I thought I had failed. I was playing a character of myself.
During that time, I never told the truth about a lot of things. I've carefully decided what pieces of information to share, and which I felt too ashamed to tell a soul.
I was adopted at birth, and around 2015, I decided to do what I could to find them. I filed the legal documents necessary to unlock my original birth record. Since then, I've discovered both birthparents and learned that nothing that I was told about my past was true. I did a DNA test, and was contacted by a cousin who was also a 'dirty little secret'. I've met 2 brothers and a sister and went no-contact with two of them, too. I was excited to meet my paternal grandmother, since I'd lost both adoptive ones too young to remember them. I didn't expect that she'd block me on everything after she learned I was gay.
I guess this blog is my attempt to get back to what my blogging used to be- a space where I can finally tell the truth, if only to myself. Maybe I'm just writing this for me, as a way to finally process everything and share the reality without the polish?