Part 6: all my besties are parasocial

mentally ill and chronically online

from the archives

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The first real use I ever found for the internet, like most of my generation, was email. The year is 2007, and I’m 9 years old in the carpeted computer room of a friend (back when people still designated entire rooms to their clunky, beige desktop sets). My friend is clicking across the screen with practiced expertise, logging in, I see, to something called Runescape. When I ask her what it is she looks at me like I’ve just pointed out to her the glowing orb in the sky, and I know, immediately, I must be involved. She tells me the only thing required to be a part of this beautiful, pixelated, medieval world is an email, and guides us with equally rapid succession to the Yahoo site. Unsurprising for a highly-strung child, I pick the coolest email address I can possibly imagine: my full, legal, birth name.

Unbeknownst to me, I had just acquired an attachment that would stay with me for what I presume will be the rest of my life, more of a limb than a finger; extending out beyond my physical body, outside any semblance of reality in my immediate world, to the many digitalised nooks of the online realm, circling back around to cradle the base of my neck, turning my gaze this way and that, resting now, in the tips of my fingers from which I write to you. It’s the room within the room. The beginnings of a void that is claustrophobic in its endlessness, the entering of which is a carelessly permanent decision. In this space, the door clicks shut behind me. I see only this: bright yellow walls from which beautiful and disastrous things emerge, which to witness feels the same as to possess.

When I log on, my first email is already there waiting for me. An automated sign-up message from Yahoo, proclaiming, ‘Welcome!’. It is glittering with the lustre of something new, enticingly foreign and yet already familiar, and it is glorious.  

I took to emails like some do journals, diaries, and let it be and bearer of my stories – however insignificant. I wrote to my friends of the most banal things, as they did to me, and it made no difference that we had seen one another not hours ago at school. We told each other of test scores, and what we’d had for dinner. The games we’d been playing, the songs we’d been listening to (with a link to the Youtube lyric video attached), who we were rooting for on Australian Idol and whether our parents let us pay 10c to call in and vote.

from the archives p.2

Muddled in between were the long texts of chainmail’s, promising a kiss with your crush if forwarded to ten people, or a violent demise if discarded. To exist online then was to trust in the power of the internet, its prophecies, its promises. And it asked for so little. The difference between love and death was a click, a collective cursor hovering over the forward button again and again until it found itself there, in your inbox, waiting to be believed. In this there was a type of magic, an ability to carry messages with weight that would otherwise fade into air if spoken out loud.

Did we really buy those chainmail stories? It’s hard to say. But I wonder now if the true hook wasn’t this: in having someone to send you the email in the first place, and then, having someone to send it to as well.

While my email now is comprised mostly of unopened promotional material, I find that usage of social media is not so different to that early Yahoo account. Messages have been replaced with stories, posts; here is what I’m reading, listening to, watching. Here is what I ate, here is who I’m rooting for on The Bachelor, I wish I could pay 10c to vote. And the chainmail’s have been replaced by crystal-charged sounds of frequencies on TikTok with dated fortune, that ask only to be interacted with for good luck (and look, the comments are filling with people typing to no one but themselves and the great mystique: i claim <3). Or better yet, consider the info-graphs, deeming you virtue signalling if reposted, or ignorant if not, and again the space between love and death seems to ask for so little: just a click.

Though here, the people I spend time speaking to are ones who have never seen, in real light, the skin of my face, the colour of my eyes. They’ve never heard the tenor of my voice, unfiltered by a microphone, my own insecure re-recordings, travelling to them through the space of a single room. I do not know their mother’s names, nor do they know mine, and if I was to see them in the street, I don’t know, truly, if it would be in us to stop and say hello.

But I have people who send me things, and people to send them to, and again that hook is in me, so deep.

When I post, I do so only in knowing there are those that receive me, the same way I receive many. I follow people who make beautiful art, who have wonderful things to say, who share with me a form of my identity that doesn’t leave me feeling so alone. I listen to strangers’ podcasts, and I pay extra just to know more of the world from their perspective. I begin to care for these people one does a friend. I’m invested in their goings, sympathetic to their shortcomings. I subscribe, I sign up, I turn on the bells and click the links and share and react and comment, I tell the world, again and again: I am here I am here. And in return, I get it back, the sound of seemingly endless others telling me: so am I.

Is this not what internet does so well, the ongoing assurance that you are seen and heard, and in this way valued? That there is someone to receive you, always, as long as you are there to give. Though here is where the trouble lies, because while to disappear would be entirely inconsequential to the internet, for the user, such a detachment wouldn’t be unlike a form of death; death of friendships unsustained, death of ideas unexplored, death of opportunities missed, cultural advances unseen, social commentary unlearned. All of it continuing, ad infinitum, with or without you.

I wonder then if the internet is truly somewhere I long to be, or a place which I’m held to, hostage to my own desire for more, constantly. And where would I go, if not online, for the connections with the world I seek? Because now, does it not feel so inadequate to look around and see only through my own eyes?

I laugh at the term, ‘chronically online’, because it tells me this: that to be so cut off from reality is a sickness, and one none of us are fully exempt from. It’s all of it that builds it; the influencers and the influenced, the offenders and offended, the acknowledged, the rejected, the followed, the blocked - a society built on the belief in the power of the online, bleeding out over our self-perception.

My favourite old emails are between my friends and I when I changed schools. Because at eleven-years-old a new school is a new life, and I needed, grievously, to not have to leave so much behind. I see in them the sincerest I miss you’s, and when will you come visit’s. There’s heart in the proximity that email allowed us, virtual conversations picking up where the real ones left off. Though I’m unsure if I’ve ever felt such closeness through a screen since, and where that places someone like me who has such little choice. When I leave social media for a day or two, there’s few friends who can still reach me. A distance emerges, physical and true. The cacophony of voices quietens, ceases entirely. It’s then that I’m forced to see it: the immateriality of a world constructed, from which to disappear feels as strange a thing to consider sometimes as death itself.

from the archives p.3