When the Internet Still Felt Like a Place, I Went There to Forget About My Body

People of a certain age have a Pavlovian response to the sounds of AOL Instant Messenger: the creak of a door opening, signaling that someone has signed on; the chime of a sent message; perhaps the alarm bell specially assigned to signal the arrival of your crush. Or a cow’s moo, for some reason.

These sounds transport me to my tween and early teen years and the evenings I spent on AIM, LiveJournal, Xanga, DeviantArt . . . and AllPoetry, Neopets, and forums where I found cheat codes for The Sims. I’d always been a quieter kid, futzing around on the computer, playing solitaire, and making clunky art with Microsoft Paint. When my family set up our first dial-up connection, I was eight years old and the only one who knew a website, one I’d seen in a movie trailer: babepiginthecity.com.

Maybe I was always destined to be Very Online. But something propelled me deeper into the digital sphere during my tweens: I hated having a body.

In childhood, I was good at tailoring my behavior to the whims of authority figures: parents, teachers, instructors. Meeting the expectations of adults is more or less the only agency a child has. I learned to anticipate what others wanted, to be “good.”

In middle school, suddenly everything was about the body. Adults claimed to know me and my peers better than we knew ourselves—what it was like to have an adolescent body, how to deal with sex-crazed troublemakers. School assemblies preemptively reprimanded us for our powerful sexual urges and the shit our hormones were making us do.

I could not relate to their characterization; I was a late bloomer and looked about ten years old until the end of eighth grade. Still, adults in my Place of Learning saw me not as an intellect but as a raging body, a creature under observation, a cat that needed spaying. I could do nothing to change this conversation or the feeling of eyes all over me.

My body’s differences constantly announced themselves—when friends discussed bra shopping or tampons, when I wore a swimsuit for PE class, when I dressed in pioneer skirts for a year because my hips were too small to hold up a pair of pants long enough for my legs. My experience of my body throughout middle and early high school was that it was an object and a problem. A rule-follower, I hated being “wrong,” and I resented that it was a physical wrongness—a small, flat lateness, unruly and disobedient—a deficiency that drew attention to itself by virtue of being observable.

Mind-fuckiest of all was having to submit to touch and attention that was “normal” but did not feel OK, like when a grown man slipped his hand below the waistband of my underwear without warning and felt me up to determine whether I had pubic hair yet. This was “fine”—he was my pediatrician, and my parent was in the room. Still, I felt degraded, sexualized. Even with this man’s hands on me, I, the human consciousness inside the body, was not acknowledged. The body spoke for me. It took me out of the conversation. So often, instead of feeling listened to, or “seen,” I felt watched—leered at.

Except online. On the internet, I didn’t have a body. It was like astral projecting into a secret treehouse with other non-embodied weirdos.

When phones did not have built-in cameras, social media (before this term was even coined) was mostly devoid of bodies. In my corner of the internet, I could scroll through blog posts without seeing any, and it wasn’t strange that I didn’t share pictures of myself. Online, I could engage with others without any shame over my physical presence. When I wrote something online and readers responded, I felt seen, not watched.

If AIM felt like a treehouse filled with people ready to chat in real time, LiveJournal felt like entering that treehouse and discovering someone’s diary open to a page they wanted me to read. On LiveJournal, each night, I caught up on maybe three blog posts that weren’t there the day before. My real-life and online-only friends summarized their days and dreams, pined vaguely after crushes, asked searching questions about how to articulate a feeling, and riffed on jokes recycled from Monty Python, Weebl and Bob, and Homestarrunner.com. The content did not feel groundbreaking, but the space did. I typed as quietly as possible in the glow of my family’s desktop computer while everyone else slept. My interactions felt freest and most intimate when I was physically alone.

In both spaces, I existed under a username I would have had to give someone; a curious person couldn’t search my name to find my blog or message me. The internet felt not exactly private, but small, not interconnected. If the internet of my adolescence had a look, it was the pastel of sparkle Gelly Roll pens. Its scent was cucumber-melon body spray. It felt like marabou boas and denim. There was a coziness in that treehouse in the astral plane, where other people were also starving for genuine connection through their self-consciousness—not just me. I miss that internet as I remember it, as a sort of DIY junk space, one that regular people—my teachers, extended family, less-shy peers—hardly considered. It was that internet, my treehouse, that got me through awful years, one day at a time.

Ultimately, my ritual of living on the internet to ignore my body outlasted its original usefulness—and the internet itself changed over time, affecting the kinds of connections I could find there. Eventually, my body caught up to my peers’, which was uncomfortable too. My developing body (a cringey phrase, even now) also brought me attention I didn’t want, but over the years, it subsided.

On the internet, I didn’t have a body. It was like astral projecting into a secret treehouse with other non-embodied weirdos.

I now have a body that no one poses to me as a problem. I’m white, slim, blonde, tall but not very—this is one of the least vilified, least persecuted bodies to have in this country. (Though, as a person with a uterus, my reproductive rights and bodily autonomy are perennially up for debate in Congress, and doctors are very likely to dismiss my health concerns.) With these privileges, I feel like I of all people should be over any hang-ups about my body. Still, I’m not often fully in it. I stay in my head, occupied with worries and plans, and I check the same apps multiple times a day, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

Myspace, Facebook, and the phrase social media entered the mainstream when I was a teen. These websites—not yet apps—were still metaphors for spaces. You’d visit someone’s profile page to find their photos, a custom background, and lists of favorite bands and movies, entering a miniworld to learn about who “lived” there. But features like Myspace’s Bulletin Board and Facebook’s News Feed were doing something different, aggregating users’ thoughts and actions into a snapshot of a collective consciousness: What is everyone talking about right now? These sites also made it easier to upload photographs, to display our faces and day-to-day activities. The internet was moving away from a space that felt like an alternative to the “real” world, instead becoming a huge part of it.

Looking to social media for a feeling of intimacy now seems absurd, given how hyperpublic everything is. Now, if you criticize the president (sorry, the grifter-in-chief) on Twitter, he might yell back at you or inspire his fans to threaten physical harm to you, a private citizen. Job-search hub Monster.com warns that prospective employers will definitely stalk your social media accounts. The Department of Homeland Security requests social media information from most US visa applicants and can deny you entry if people you follow hold “political points of view that oppose the US.”

There also used to be a difference in platforms for slow communication (email, blogs, and comments) and instant communication (AIM, Gchat). Now all of the main social media apps have a direct messaging feature. They all show “read receipts,” so even my looking is watched! I do want some level of engagement with people online, or I wouldn’t be on these platforms at all. But I don’t always have it in me to engage in real time. I love recent arguments that it’s time to bring back the Away Message.

It’s clear that the internet was never inherently altruistic or equalizing—it was just less ubiquitous, quieter, weirder. I’m looking for that treehouse feeling whenever I pull my phone out of my pocket to scroll on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, which I know is foolish. Twitter in particular seems to prioritize sensational content, serving up upsetting news and hot takes. I know my time and energy will be taken for a ride, and yet I can’t stop looking.

I’ve come to think of infinite scrolling as a type of trance. To break trance, you have to come back to the body. You clap three times, place salt on the tongue. To break trance, you have to want to come back. In my haphazard dives into esoteric teachings, I’ve held on to this idea that floored me: Someone who spends too much time in trance and in unseen realms is not very attached to this world.

Escaping to the internet provided me an alternate social space and a distraction when I needed one most, but it didn’t cure me of anything. I outgrew my “problem” body and am no longer in a life stage when it’s apparently open season to comment on it. But I haven’t healed the feelings of helplessness that made me want to stop having a body. And I haven’t done anything (except, perhaps, writing this essay) to combat a culture of talking to pubescent minors like they are animals, or adults talking among each other about a child’s increasingly adult body as though it is an interesting object up for discussion.

Someone who spends too much time in trance and in unseen realms is not very attached to this world.

The persecution of, and dangers imposed on, various bodies by authority figures in the United States is beyond the scope of this essay—but this too is a culture to fight. I think of my body as not-explicitly-persecuted, but cis and trans women contend with a culture of patriarchal violence every day, from harmful legislation and unequal wages to widely accepted myths about our inferiority to targeted abuse and worse. Still, if I don’t feel at home in my body and have to retrain myself to spend time in it, I can’t imagine the work other people have to do to feel at home in their bodies, if they ever do.

Someday, I want to have children, but no part of me looks forward to being pregnant—a second puberty. From what I’ve observed of pregnant acquaintances and relatives, the most surprising people will find it appropriate to discuss your weight, size, shape, and genitals; comment on how correctly or not you look or are “showing”; tell you what to eat; suggest that you are a potential danger to other people and yourself with your hormonal brain. Strangers feel at liberty to touch you, as though having a pregnant belly renders you public property. How intensely I dread this—and how little I believe in my own power to redirect grabbing hands or demeaning talk about my body—reinforces that the internet didn’t heal any of my feelings, merely distracted me from them.

“Healing” via distraction feels like a problem of this era. We are sold programs, gadgets, and apps to help us survive systemic issues when we don’t believe we are capable of making the systems themselves survivable. I am reminded of when, in tears after a boss at an old job yelled in my face, I listened as my coworker praised the app Headspace, how it made it possible for her to continue working within an abusive corporate culture—though she didn’t use these words.

“They yell at everyone,” she said. “You don’t have to feel embarrassed about crying; we’ve all done it. You should get this app. I meditate on the subway every day, and then I feel like I can do anything. And you can do anything, too.”

Instead of feeling inspired, I was furious. For both of us. Paying thirteen dollars a month to listen to guided meditations during my hectic morning commute, so that I could better control my response to someone screaming at me, would mean that I would be spending money to make myself more docile, to enable out-of-control men to go on oblivious and unchecked.

All of the green juices and crystals and breath work in the world wouldn’t improve my life—they would just be Band-Aids to help me get through one more day of tolerating whatever someone else decided to do to me, and to everyone who has been in a position like this. These Band-Aids might make us feel better, but they also support and uphold the dysfunction that sends us running to them.

I like how, during the pandemic, with so many of us at home on our computers, the internet is being used in an effort to actually fix problematic systems. Online petitions and Instagram accounts and Twitter pushback are changing conversations—and in some cases, legislation—around racism, police brutality, livable wages, stimulus checks, and rent freezes. The internet as it exists now is designed to be a distraction, even an addiction, but we are deciding how to make it work for us. We can fight to heal the system, not just the symptoms.

All of this is with the caveat that, realistically, most of us have little choice about how to change our lived experience—especially right now, with Covid-19 limiting jobs and access to money and where we can physically be. Not every body is a safe home. Not every home is a safe home. We do what we can to get through. In some ways, the pandemic makes me feel again like my awkward tween-self, biding time with my coping mechanisms. In 2020, it seems especially ridiculous to advise anyone to be in the “real world” more—though that was my New Year’s resolution.

I am not joking. I made spreadsheets of places I wanted to visit with friends; I wanted to spend less time on the computer. But with the pandemic limiting what “the world” entails for the foreseeable future, I’m spending more time on the internet than ever. I’m grateful to still have a job when so many people do not, but it feels amazingly taxing to spend over forty hours a week staring into this fluorescent rectangle, in my ill-lit apartment. If I want to socialize with anyone outside of my home, this also happens on my computer.

This is a time of mass trauma. I don’t think it’s wrong to use distractions or rely on electronics to help us through to the other side. It would be too easy to say that a simple return to the body is what’s needed, or that this is advice everyone can follow.

But with the pandemic limiting what “the world” entails for the foreseeable future, I’m spending more time on the internet than ever.

I do think it’s important to tune in to the body, though, when possible. The therapist I mentioned in my last column was a somatic psychologist and reminded me how to hear and feel what my body has to say. I’m used to spending a lot of time in my head, where, logically, two options can seem impossible to choose between. But my body knows if I dread one choice—clenching the shoulders, a cold feeling in my chest—and favor another.

By taking me out of my body, the internet took me away from this self-knowledge. It gave me an amorphous home but left me adrift. Recultivating a relationship with my body has been essential to recultivating a relationship of trust with myself. When I feel too attached to unseen realms, I have to remind myself to come back, to trust my visceral dread, heart-ballooning joy, or head-muffling blanket of exhaustion.

When I don’t do this, my body sends a reminder I can’t ignore. Lately, my body protests against too much screen time in my scaffolding-darkened apartment by giving me visual vertigo—perhaps a lingering side effect, along with unshakeable exhaustion, from having had Covid-19 earlier this year, its own lesson in surrendering to the body’s needs and being very gentle with myself. I’m lucky and grateful to have recovered, trying to move more slowly than my workaholic Virgo-moon mind is used to.

People funnier than I am have compared the body to a plant. You have to give it water, air, and light to keep it alive. The actual plants in my apartment are all but dead—I have nowhere to put them where they can feel the sun. I’m taking more walks, resting more, prescribing myself fresh air. As a tween, I wanted to upload my consciousness into the internet and never have to deal with a body again. The past nine months have felt like that; now I know how wrong I was. It feels so good to eat, to have my tense shoulders massaged, to take a long, salty bath.

I’ve recultivated a relationship with this body, but still, I can’t be in it constantly. I need to move back and forth between realms to be able to function well in any of them. I’m reteaching myself that old intentionality, when I’d sit at the computer in the evenings for internet-life, then sign out and live my “real life,” with boundaries asserted by the limitations of technology. Now that there are no limitations, it’s been too easy not to have boundaries between these worlds. That’s what I’m trying to change.

I’m learning to be fully present in both worlds and enact stronger boundaries between them. I’m trying to be honest with myself about what’s intention and what’s compulsion. To my fellows who also want Away Messages and not-smart phones, my best to you. When you need help teleporting back, clap three times, place salt on your tongue, feel the earth under your feet, and get some full-spectrum light, my friends. We’re doing what we can with what we have.

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