What the fuck was going on when I was a teenager?
It’s the year 2021 and I’m sitting down and looking at the colorful keys on my keyboard flickering and shimmering and on the monitor in front of me is a relic of the mid-2000’s, a relic of a time and a place and a something that’s outside of my memory. I think it’s likely the last thing that I had left from that time–the last vestige of anything written down and worth hanging on to–the thing that I, for some reason, left up in my online gallery. Why keep it up? Why, out of all the things that I didn’t delete, did that one stay up? Maybe there’s some tiny mote of truth or realness in it. Or maybe it never struck me as significant.
But now that’s one of the few things I have left from that time. I have ancient Facebook photos–I was an alpha tester–but I never went and did a purge of my mainstream social media that went back that far, as there wasn’t anything edgy or honest enough that was worth deleting. But there’s still relics from those years, public for the world to see, on niche art/fandom websites. I think there was something about the art/fandom community that I was in that made it feel like I could be honest. We were so fucking weird, so idiosyncratic, tolerant to a fault and creative in all the wrong ways–maybe that was why it seemed like it was okay to leave up. Who would see it besides the weird art kids who were too eccentric and self-involved to pass their own judgment?
I think a lot of us who grew up on the internet have a track record of pure cringe; opinions and ideas that were so, so bad–so cliche, so weird, so nonsensical, so poorly informed–but which seemed fun, profound, or totally right at the moment of first posting. Take my cartoon self: a bright purple, sugar-fed fairy with a Lovecraftian mouth filled with fangs and Kinder Eggs. I think I must have loved becoming my character. She was good clean fun. And I mean it, clean: no butthole, no pussy, no sex. On the reference sheet that I have of her, I’ve written down that she’s 100% asexual: disinterested, physically incapable, and able to nope out of a scary situation by disappearing into a cloud of cotton candy. The collective fantasy that I held on to with the rest of my weird artistic friends was one in which I could leave all the dangers of the world behind; it was a place that was safe, easy, enticing.
I began to leave the fandom behind in my second year of college, the year when I began to forget. The fog stole into me gently at first: it was harder to learn, to place things. I wasn’t as sharp. I blamed the anti-depressants that I was taking for making my speech slur and my brain slow down. I blamed it for making me fatter, for making the despondence I was trying to deal with even worse. Sleeping, which had never come easily for me, became nearly impossible. Sleeping drugs were hard to cope with, hard to manage. Take too few, and I’d be up all night. Take too many and I’d sleep for most of the day, spending my evenings pacing back and forth, filled with restless energy and ennervated at the small-town quietude right outside my dormitory window. I’d never been somewhere so quiet at night before, and the silence–interrupted only by the odd sprinkler or the soft hooting of an owl–drove me mild with waves of anxiety. But this, too, I blamed on my diagnosis and all the fallout thereof–a secret which I kept close to my heart.
After my first year of college, I had been diagnosed with Biploar II disorder, despite never having anything that was like a real bout of mania or hypomania–just endless depression that seemed to suddenly lift when I was removed from my nuclear family. But like my cartoon self, it’s something that seems to have stuck with me–a label that isn’t accurate, but fits conveniently for life in a system where whatever is going on with you, the individual, is your own fucking problem. It’s more likely that my issues come from a bad case of complex post-traumatic stress disorder and a smidgeon of autism; not an internal flaw of any of my components, but the problems reflect what happens when you misuse a custom-build running linux; it’s not going to be a windows or mac no matter what you do, and though you can kludge together a ported driver to get things running, it is not going to run the same as if it were on a native system. And if you push a machine to the limit, mining bitcoin or subjecting it to intense human misery without a chance to escape–well, you’re going to see some drops in the framerate, kid.
At the time when I started to crash, I was pretty sure that whatever going on was my own fucking problem. The best way I can describe it is like when you’re trying to render and export video, but things aren’t working quite right. All of a sudden, frames start to drop out of the image: one or two at first, but then entire segments of the video are reduced to a handful of frames. Memories, even recent ones, started to look like a kid’s attempt at stop-motion animation, made wildly with little regard to the integrity of the picture. I can see, and hear, fragments of things that I know definitely happened–things that others were there for, that others remembered. But so much began to fall away. I tried to hide it, becoming more and more withdrawn.
And for a few weeks in the winter of 2011, my entire memory started to collapse. I began to live like an animal, moment-to-moment: assignments and classes and everything seemed to fall away from me, and no matter how hard I concentrated it seemed impossible to catch up. I’d spend my time listening to music, walking, trying to keep myself fed; but the fat I’d gotten from the antidepressants started to fall off, my hair started to fall out, and my sleeping hours became fragmented. I called for help one night, and went to see the college counselor the next; they weren’t able to help me get to see a psychiatrist, despite the fact that there was one sitting, biding her time and playing on her phone, in the office one floor beneath me. Because my parents had private health insurance that covered me, I wasn’t able to get help; and with no car or way of getting to the local hospital for treatment, I tried to hold on–crying, endlessly, about something related to my dad–but I couldn’t cope, go to class, maintain my grades. I had to go home on medical leave.
I remember trying to tell one of my instructors, a Chinese professor who was affiliated with a governmental outreach program, what had happened to me. “I couldn’t remember who I was. I don’t know what happened in my life.” She tried to comfort me by saying that she’d had a similar experience, but I knew from the look of deep concern in her face that she had no idea what had happened to me. I knew that she was worried, but I also knew that whatever had been happening was completely abnormal. I worried for myself: did this mean that my brain was gone? The one thing that I’d been really proud of–the literally genius level IQ that I’d tested at–was gone, now. I was just an empty husk of average and dropout. I’d come into college with so much energy and so much dynamism–and now all that was gone. I had to go to community college and pray to be re-admitted to my elite institution.
By the time that I had to go home, I couldn’t remember most of my childhood. I couldn’t remember anything from high school–no school trips, not much of what I’d read or learned, and even the names of most of my friends still escape me. Just as I was headed home, I broke off all my relationships with the people who I’d used to know. How could I face my gifted peers when I’d lost everything? How could I possibly face people who I’d completely forgotten? Even now, more than half a decade later, I can’t remember a single conversation with the people who I went to school with for six years. I can’t remember any of our milestones, though I can conjure up an inkling of what they might have been like. But I can’t know for sure. I don’t remember. I am here, now, and there must have been a chain of events that brought me here; but so much of it has vanished that I can’t be sure what happened. The memories that I do have of major events–events that were covered by journalists, historians, artists, everyone, etched into our national memory as Americans–are just as vague. I can remember the smell of human flesh pervading New York City on 9/12/2011, but I can’t remember much of the days before or after; or even of the day itself, except that the sky was such a beautiful shade of blue that it seemed completely impossible for something so bad to have happened—all fake until my mom wasn’t able to get home to us that night.
I only remember the broadest strokes of the time between 2011 and 2012. I remember a few faces, a few class projects, a few concerts–but those I remember from the stubs, the photos, old emails that still exist somewhere. But what I do know is this: it was a blessing, because I’d forgotten why I was so afraid to go back to my parents. I’d forgotten why every return home was an endless wash of panic. I curled up in the bed that I’d had since I outgrew my toddler-sized cot and cried myself to sleep at the sight of the mess I’d made for myself. I logged onto the art website and posted more hand-drawn pictures, watercolors, digital art. In all the turmoil, I fell out of playing Furcadia, but I kept in touch with my online friends; I had records, easy descriptions of all our conversations. There were reference sheets, visual aids, online journals and comments. There were forum posts and transcripts of our pretend-play sessions. I could remember all my friends, and they remembered me.
When the real world failed me–when my brain failed me, when my heart failed me– that digital numina was there for me to embrace. That normal world, that every day world that I’d been told I could own so easily–it was lost to me. But that digital world, that world of abstraction and farce and weird random inventiveness–that was real. I could hold onto it. I had a record. I had friends. I’d learned things. I was real there, and real to my friends there. They were real to me. So as all the rest of the world came down around me, as I conveniently forgot my backstory like the protagonist of a low-budget role playing game, I became a purple fairy with a mouth full of sweet teeth. My friends were a possum, a shiba inu dog, and a Pikachu. And things were, for the moment, okay.