Oh wait, do you follow...

On a lifetime of parasocial relationships

Miranda Cosgrove, but also all of us.

In 2013, I sold a pair of Doc Martens to my favourite person to follow on the internet. She looked like an avatar in person. A hologram exchanging money for my lightly used Docs that gave me unbearable blisters. She dressed for the occasion in the exact same thing I’d seen her wear in photos. She pretended to know me— I looked familiar she said —but we both knew that wasn’t true.

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As did all elder millennials, I got tangled up with the internet in the days of MSN. Rushing home from school, savouring the days that I didn’t have immediate after-school activities — dance, auditions, piano lessons, math tutoring — so that I could park it in front of my Dell and watch my friends appear green. I lived to be seen, so my MSN name was always oscillating between a statement that read as either bubbly or moody. If things with me and my elementary school on-again, off-again were good, I’d put his initials in my status, as you did.

❤️🌹 Brittany*~ -Love is a Battlefield ~*~ JH *~ luv u weirdo 🤪 (Something along those lines, you remember how it was. I went through a Pat Benatar moment after 13 Going on 30 came out).

There was always drama to investigate on the heels of a status that yearned for attention, teachers to bitch about, shit to shoot. At the powerful age of 12, my MSN chats were calculated and intentional: in one, I could be investigating the intentions of my crush and whether or not he was planning to escort me to the community centre dance in his mum’s minivan. In another, I’d be reconnecting with a Winnipeg boy I met during the summer — did he still have the hots for me? Let’s find out.

At the dashboard, I may as well have been a finance person working at the stock exchange. MSN held the highest form of currency in pre-teenhood. We were training for the Olympics of Perception, crafting ourselves as bold, silver-tongued tweens as our parents served us our after-school snacks and told us our screen time was nearly up.

Everyone was different online. Still free from the shackles of the screenshot, our metamorphosis into creatures of the web had begun. My love of cyber-stalking sprouted within the chaotic home screen of my MSN dashboard. Life was sweet as long as you had your own computer situation and limited dial-up interruptions.

I did. Sort of. My Dell was meant for school work only, with the occasional supervised play permitted, but the hum of it in my bedroom called to me. At night, after school, in the morning before the rest of the house woke up. The glow of a piping hot laptop held the world I wanted to be in and who was I to deny myself the pleasure and vastness of a brand-new internet with much to explore?

MSN became MySpace and Nexopia, which became Tumblr and Live Journal and on and on we went.

I joined all of them. Carefully crafting my web presence so that I could wipe my real self clean. I arranged the pieces like a tedious game of Tetris — profile photos, song lyrics, headlines — with each new tweak I was born again.

On the Internet, I was sad, impossibly tortured, ruthlessly quick! In real life, I was a deeply self-conscious middle-class, underweight sprite who loved show tunes, Seinfeld, and the warmth of attention.

I loved all the platforms and personalities they gave me — Tumblr, of course, in particular — but another website cropped up in my late teens that I came to love much, much more.