Journal Entries
1. Jan. 19th, 2026
Jan. 19th, 2026 - I'm Still Online Because I Love You
When I was 12, I spent almost an entire summer feeling like I was the only person left on Earth. My parents worked days and the only sibling still living with us was (and I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense) a complete shut-in. I think I went almost the entire three months of vacation without interacting with another human being face-to-face. To my memory, there were only three exceptions: waving to people in the neighborhood while out riding by bike, buying stuff at the corner store down the street on the rare occasion I found change or cash on the road, and running into my older brother in the kitchen at 3AM. The bulk of my conversations happened online. As strange as it is, I remember these times fondly. I sang a lot and would submit recordings for online choruses for people I met on YouTube. I would also spend hours on Skype with those same people, who were usually teenagers just a few years older than me. I realize as an adult that these teenagers, along with the very few who were in their early twenties, were likely keeping a defensive eye on me to try and steer me away from our community that was - this part is also in hindsight - rife with predators. I’ve always been lucky in that sense: people have always looked out for me.
I am, however, also very lucky it all came crashing down. Well, at least just long enough to get in a few years of regular in-person social development. I don’t remember the specifics very well anymore, but a combination of 1. the fallout of a physical letter from an online friend being intercepted by my mom (who was not happy that I gave a stranger our home address), 2. my laptop charger port breaking to the point of no return, and 3. an amalgam of various social problems in my online friend groups that I will only touch on very vaguely (mostly because I don’t remember them that well anymore) all meant that I was slowly pulling myself away from sticky pull of the internet by the end of 7th grade. I also met the kid who would become my first boyfriend on our last day of school that year. I thought about him all summer. We ended up being in the same homeroom come the end of August. I retreated into his friend group of emo mall rats and suddenly didn’t have much time for an already-obliterated online life.
As you may expect, that also did not end in a Happily Ever After. Again, I won’t detail my middle-turned-high school drama here, but I got involved in some pretty bad circles in real life, and it made me too paranoid to leave my house, especially to go to school. I didn’t feel like I had anyone left. To top off how horrible real life was going, the first person I ever fell in love with died while I was in band camp. He was terminally ill our entire friendship and wasn’t expected to last as long as he did. Since we met online, I didn’t tell anyone about any of this until around two and a half years later. Not only was I embarrassed by how much it meant to me - remember, I was a freshman at this point in my life - but I didn’t have the words for this kind of loss yet. I remember wailing at the top of my lungs and falling to my knees in anguish as I read the text. I think my brother (who was eternally home, still) didn’t want to seem invasive by asking what was wrong… but that’s only if he heard me wailing at all.
Back to Online I went. One of very few people I trusted in real life killed himself shortly after school let out. He was only a few weeks shy of his 18th birthday. Likewise, I was planning to kill myself the day I had to go back to school at the end of August. It’s funny; I had really already given up, totally resolved that these were my last few weeks on Earth, and still, I spent them all just like I had spent that one summer. I rode my bike out to the fields. I sat in the tall grass and listened to music on fraying earbuds. I mostly talked to strangers online and only infrequently to my family. I stayed up all night on voice calls, watching the sun come up through my window, waiting until the trains blew their horns at dawn to signal it was time to go to bed. I was ready to die.
Well, I was ready to die until I forgot to kill myself.
I met my future husband near the end of August that year. We stayed up all night talking the very first night we got in touch. I was instantly taken with him, my Scheherazade, keeping me alive just one night at a time. I read poetry. I even wrote some, mostly about him. I started inviting friends in real life to hang out again, and conversely, began accepting their invites out of the house. I looked up at the sky and wondered if it had always - or ever - been this blue.
The end of August came and went unnoticed. I asked to be pulled out of public school to avoid further visits from the truancy officer, which was eagerly acquiesced once I revealed I had been preparing to commit suicide the months prior.
It’s a little more complicated than this. By that last arc, I had gotten better at keeping one foot in real life and one foot in the digital. I had gotten my license and could pick up my friends, who were all still in public school, after classes let out; and I was able to drive and meet my online friends who lived out of state. I even made the pilgrimage to Atlanta a couple of times while I was still a teenager. With my newfound agency, online friends became a bridge to occasional real-life friends. Perhaps the best example of this is my then-boyfriend, now-husband moving in with me about a year and a half into our relationship.
Online is still bad. I do really love connecting with people; I think I meet more people that are better matches for my slightly intense personality while online. Even in my twenties, I feel like this is a result of being lucky that people (generally) look out for me. I still can’t stand that there are massive algorithms designed to get us to keep our attention spans short and trained on outrage; I cannot abide by the fact that these social media platforms desperately want us all to spend time on hating people, not even as human individuals, but as faceless representations of arguments we may not even make. Every minute I spend online, I remind myself I am spending my precious, ever-waning life on the natural endpoint of the 24-hour news cycle introduced during the Reagan administration.
I know that this is partially cope, but I also believe myself to be in a Ksitigarbha-esque situation. I would never want to escape samsara if it meant leaving anyone behind. I will continue, no matter how futile it may be, to try and make Online a better place for the people I interact with, no matter how small the intersection of our paths may be. I’m still no real Ksitigarbha, though. I often find myself typing things and then going, "Does anyone really need my opinion on this, or am I writing this for my ego, just so people know I have The Answer?" Sometimes, I fail and post it anyways. Still, I interrogate any feeling Online gives me very closely: I will never harbor hatred in my heart for another human being because of the inherent distortion in the Online. I love you more than I love being right, more than I love attention, more than I love serving something that hates you and me both. I don’t care who you are. I love you, and I want the best for you. I don’t even care if you think I’m a nut-job for loving you or that if you don’t think I could love anyone I don’t know. May God forgive me if I ever forget any of this.
I will always value the connections I make with other human beings on here. It’s becoming (and will only continue to become) more difficult to distinguish which icons even have a person behind them. I don’t know what effect that is going to have on my time on here, but for now, I’m here and I’m not leaving because there are people I loved, love, and will love on here. It is a great privilege to be born in an age where the life I live is even possible. Again, may God forgive me if I ever forget any of this.
I take this seriously because I value the feelings, time, and experiences of any human being more than I value the internet. This is a ridiculously dangerous thing we have introduced to human civilization. We use it mostly for things considered frivolous, occasionally for things considered useful, and rarely for things we consider lethal. Imagine what it can do to us if we only regard it as the first two. Imagine if no one looked out for me. Now know that there are many 12-year-olds left to their own devices - literally - and that they aren’t capable of nor are they responsible for setting their own limits and only making good decisions. I can hardly expect this of adults; imagine what it’s doing to our most vulnerable.
I’ll give you one example. There’s a new offender model for digital sexual predators, with two main types: the contact-driven and the fantasy-driven. The former is probably what you think of when you imagine a pedophile; their end goal is to meet with children in real life and physically assault them. The latter is a new invention, wholly unconcerned with “real children” as a physical interface, only motivated by the idea of sexual contact with children. These offenders do contact and violate real children, but they aren’t interested in meeting them in real life, and occasionally aren’t even interested in real photos or videos of the underage victim. Don’t misread any sympathy into this; I am not saying “the internet made them do it.” I am, however, giving you an example of the unique ways the internet facilitates dehumanizing real people to the point of real harm. These offenders may never even see the child they’re preying upon for sexual gratification - digitally or physically - and opt for text- or audio-based exploitation.
In general, pedophiles are opportunists with flagrant disregard for the rights and well-being of their victims. The more orthodox sexual offender already cares little, if any, for the needs and personhood of the child(ren) they exploit, but the unique aspect of the fantasy-driven offender is that the barriers that may make potential sexual offenders turn around before they lay hands on a child - the ones that serve as a reminder of their juvenile status or that the child is a real person in the first place: inability to drive, physical appearance, etc - are all 100% gone when the abuse happens online. Pair this with a constant generational gap in technological literacy between parent and child, then add the widespread availability of technology and the internet, and top it off with parents who, for one reason or another, let screens raise their children. This is Promethean fire, indeed.
I hope you are well-defended against the algorithms that seep into your consciousness, and if not, I hope I have made you question them at least a little bit. Do you ever feel yourself pre-writing a tweet? It doesn’t have to be a profound one, but you might be watching a movie, then itching to post your reaction online, your brain already clamoring for something witty to say. You might be having a bad day and think: ”I can’t wait for my boss to walk away so I can pull out my phone and tweet ‘if one more bad thing happens today, I will kill myself.’” The people we love worm their way into our thoughts, words, and deeds. That’s natural when you spend a lot of time together. Do you love the internet that much? Do you love it to the point of giving you words to write your life with?
I fear for us all. I really do. I get depressed just thinking about the people who have sent themselves down spirals of hatred and illness. You have entire online spaces dedicated to anorexia; to self-harm; to encouraging these in people and documenting it, then sharing it among fellow tormentors. I even feel horrible for those involved with cultivating and stoking the flames of hatred of fellow human beings, all in the name of Online. You can’t even get away from it: anyone can capture a picture of you and upload it for widespread distribution; you have no say in whether or not you “go viral.”
I can’t get away from it either. A big part of it is habit or addiction (likely somewhere in-between). But I try to be thoughtful about it, at least. I feel like devices with internet connection should come with a big sticker on it, but I’m not even sure what it would say. Maybe “don’t use” would be good for the time being.
Have you ever read a law and thought: “Well, that’s only an important societal safeguard for stupid people, and I should be allowed to do whatever I want?" Many stupid people and intelligent people alike think this. The intelligent also fall prey to being human just like anyone else does. You can appeal to base desires easily. It doesn’t take a fool to fall for such a thing. Still, imagine someone incapable of understanding what they’re up against and what it’s doing to them. What would you have them do with the internet? I recommend doing whatever that is. I don’t think any of us understand the real impact of “RECOMMEND_NEXT” on our brains.
The more I type, the more I think I’m a fool and a hypocrite for staying on here. I’m no Ksitigarbha and I don’t know the way out of samsara. Even when meeting evil bare-faced, I think I’m incapable of comprehending it for what it is. Let me believe I am here because I love you. More importantly, let me keep one foot in and one foot out. Only the sober Odysseus could rescue his men from the lotus-eaters; let my Scheherazade do the same.
. . . edits by Cypress - thanks!