A/S/L?
A nod to growing up in the 90s + Part II of my ode to Dolly Alderton's 'Everything I Know About Love'
Upon reflection, it probably wasn't wise for my parents to let their eleven-year-old online.
It wasn't their fault. Everyone was doing it, and to be online meant to be free. To have a computer in your room meant to be invincible. Screen time at 10 pm? Don't mind if I do. Hopping on email right after school? You bet. Of course, in those days, being online meant tying up the phone line. It's not that we had a lot of important calls coming through, just that my parents wanted the option of important calls coming through. This meant I had to strategize my chat room follies very carefully.
It meant I had to get crafty.
While my early screen names mainly consisted of people I was obsessed with (namely Catherine Zeta-Jones), I’m sure there were a few references to my birth year thrown in because it was very important the world knew how old I was. Thirty-something me cringes at the pedos that kind of recklessness might invite today, but at eleven, my biggest worry was simply fitting in. And so I went, a/s/l ing my way through chatrooms with names like CZJ Fans or Music Lovers and looking for love and friendships in all the wrong places. Mostly, I was just looking for girlfriends; my school friends weren’t that interested in me, and truthfully, I wasn’t that interested in them.
What I wanted were fantasy friends. Girls who were cooler than me because they lived on the West Coast and spent sun-soaked days reading White Fang under palm trees. Tan, glistening versions of myself who had the benefit of being born under the glow of Hollywood. Boys who might pine after me because I was from Boston. Well, New Hampshire but what’s a little fibbing among friends? I wasn’t picky. I’d let anyone pay attention to me.
It was around this time I started developing an imaginary best friend. I know, it’s embarrassing. Eleven is way too old to have an imaginary friend. But I was also very obsessed with ghosts. My parents like to tell the story of how, when they bought the house I grew up in at six years old, the thing I was most excited about was that it sat between two cemeteries. This is true. I was a creepy kid.
So when I say I had an imaginary friend named Adam, a blonde little boy with bright blue eyes, what I really mean is that I was a very lonely kid who liked ghosts and was obsessed with Greatest American Hero and those things culminated into believing I had a friend only I could see. A ghost friend.
It all sounds so sad now. But when you’re growing up in the suburbs, all you have is escapism. Ghosts, AIM, imaginary friends, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that you never felt alone.
What mattered, was that you never had to face who you really were.
So, this was a problem. In this way, my parents were probably relieved when I started spending so much time online because at least they knew I was talking to real people. But this only bred a new kind of obsession. When I entered chat rooms, it's not that I was creating a fake identity, it's that I felt like I finally got to be myself. At school, I was painfully shy; I only stood out so far as to be made fun of. There was the incident at camp involving my crush. The locker incident. The having-rocks-thrown-at-me incident. Being online meant finally getting to be myself and being loved for it.
This feeling of being able to create friendships with people I didn't know was exhilarating and, on reflection, probably where I learned to internalize and glorify nostalgia. Where I learned that withholding —answering emails, AIM messages, requests for A/S/L—was power. A way to hold onto that power for just a little bit longer before volleying it back to the other side. It’s probably why I stopped engaging in the present and instead learned to live in the past. When Gatsby said “Can't repeat the past? Why, of course you can.” I felt that. Because I do it every hour of every day, over and over, until the pain of reality slowly fades away.
I hope you enjoyed! I’d love to know your own experiences in the comments. If you’re comfortable, maybe your AIM screen name?