Digital Girlhood: How The Internet Raised Us
“The Internet is going to save me from my feelings. But what is going to save me from the Internet?” — Melissa Broder, “So Sad Today”
I have never wanted to be myself. It starts with dolls.
Barbie gets a terrible haircut and loses a leg after setting her beach house on fire. Now she has three boyfriends and a plate of pink shrimp. I do and undo tragedies for entire afternoons. The final say is always my own in toyland.
Then, my aunt gives me one of her desktop computers for my 10th birthday. It could be passed off as an asteroid on size alone, but everything changes.
The Internet is a thrilling, psycho plunge into an abyss. I swim through images — so many! I have access to anything I can think of: illegal music streams, magic eight balls, faux roller coaster rides, celebrity interviews, movies, clothes waiting to be bought.
But most of all, other worlds.
I play games for hours. I tend to my digital puppies as if they are alive, and who’s to say they aren’t? They bark at me in odd tones. I give badly animated women plastic surgeries, a click of the shift and x button makes for a perfect mastopexy.
At the dinner table, the television brings me back to the original world. Commercials advertise colorful vitamins and Band-Aids for the next time I get hurt. That I will get hurt again is the only guarantee real life can offer. And I want no part of it.
When my friend turns 13, we spend half of the night in gawky bowling shoes, monstrously devouring gross slices of pizza — and the other half making out for older men on Omegle. The curiosity is a morbid one. Our audience varies from old oyster men, drunk frat boys huddled together on a couch, other teenage girls, and dark screens. Any attention is good enough for us.
As I get older, so does the internet. I buy a push-up bra and discover new avenues of life via Firefox. Yahoo Answers is my ugly chapel, group home, cool best friend. It is where you learn what nobody is teaching. Anonymous profiles conduct lessons such as how to be the prettiest girl in the entire middle school.
At night, my head hurts from everything I am learning.
I kiss a girl for five minutes on IMVU while actively avoiding my parents. I’m 14 and all anybody does is bother me. Black wings explode from her back. There are rips in her dress. Her eyes droop cartoonishly. I tell her I want to kill myself most of the time, my chemicals are rotted fruit. “Me too” she writes back with a burst of pixelated hearts.
It only takes me half of the summer to meet every person on the planet. I beg them: Can you make me famous? Do you love me right now? I love myself most when looking into my webcam. Watch me love myself.
There is hardly any difference between the realities we weaved as kids and the ones we weave now except the space we do it in, which are mostly various social media platforms. We live beneath a quilt of fluorescent escapism all the same.
Sharing yourself — the shiny, needy, trophy version that cannot go unloved for one more second — with strangers has become essential. Water, food, instant gratification from people online.
We are both the voyeurs and the silhouette taking off her clothes.
There will never be anything like there was before. Nostalgia burns. I still cry about the last week of middle school even if I would never go back given the chance. The past is a room you can’t get back into once you’ve left. But the internet is forever.
Let’s get out of here. My void and I will be waiting in the abyss.
Jasmine Ledesma lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared or is set to appear in places like Borderlands, Vice, Rattle and [PANK] among others. Her work was also nominated for both Best of The Net and the Pushcart Prize in 2020. She was recently awarded a fellowship with Brooklyn Poets.
