I was a fairly old person when I discovered the internet, even for my generation. I started logging onto sites like “Starfire’s Redwall Abbey” at the age of 12. (Nowadays, that’s like not reading until you’re well into junior high.) I spent a huge amount of time on Redwall-themed forums and Neopets throughout my young teenage years, logging on to an unsecured wireless network on a school laptop, hunched in the corner of my bed, desperately trying not to lose my one bar of signal or give away what I was doing. (The family thought I was writing. A lot. I was.)
From the first day I started poking around those message boards, I discovered a community of people so diverse it was staggering. Of course, we were almost all of a minimum class and education level, at the very least, and we all shared a common if fairly obscure interest in a book series involving sword-wielding mice. But compared to my little homeschooled world of about five people besides my family, it was revolutionary and refreshing. I met brash, outspoken Canadians; lesbians with a flare for the artistic; several grammatically prim and proper English lads and lassies; big-hearted Texans; and a plethora of shy girls and boys who, like me, were hiding behind the nearly-anonymous face of a cartoon avatar to let their true selves loose, the people they couldn’t be in their homes or churches or schools.
I made every internet interaction count. I wanted to produce content, not troll or waste my virtual breath. I won third place in a survivor writing contest, created my own e-zine, contributed for a while to the most popular Redwall-themed e-zine, and started a forum where my strange little posse and I could go crazy and talk about silly things as much as we wanted. At the height of my internet career, I was churning out about 10-15 articles per month, editing another dozen or so, and role playing a huge list of characters on various forums in the midst of all that.
And I was making friends. I was sharing my life with these online presences as much as I could, and probably as much as I would have with schoolmates. I discovered that in some ways, it was much easier to have an online friend group, because you could walk away from a message thread and come back to it at any time. If I had to quickly shut down the ‘net connection, I could do so without being rude. Plus, the community I discovered was teaching me so many new things about how the world worked. We all came from different religious backgrounds, different philosophies of life, different educational techniques and different hobbies, and all of those contributed to and shaped our (generally) civil discussions. I was exposed to ideas that were taboo in my home, things that I was able to consider long before I began Running Start a few years later. The formation of my personal philosophy began during a year that most of my peers were using to Catch ‘Em All and ride around on imaginary broomsticks, interjecting with laments about the onset of puberty.
Not that I didn’t participate in all of that, too. As much as I could get away with, I would run around from summer to winter with the neighborhood kids, pretending to be Rattata and lions in a circus and “Jiggy Nye” (long story). I was able to temper my rise to early philosophical young adulthood with playing imagination games much longer than other young teens I knew. I came away from the combined experiences with a profound belief in the creative as a spiritual practice and the value of all people, no matter and because of their diverse points of view.
If the story ended there, I would have nothing but praise for my early internet life. Even further into the future, during my lonely days in Florida, I reached out to my old Redwallian friends and they grabbed me back in a giant virtual hug that kept me sane. But that would be too easy an ending to the tale. I have come to realize just how much my years spent celebrating a diverse community took the kickstand out from under my most basic social relationships while not preparing me to handle the inevitable clash at all.
I was raised as your basic Christian: Jesus died and rose again; his sacrifice covers all sins; follow the Bible’s instructions. It’s simplistic enough, at its most basic level, for young children to accept without a lot of questions. And I’ve seen the questioning process happen many times before amongst my friends, with varying results – some outgrow it, others grow into it, and still others have it hanging over their shoulder like a tattered cape, not really useful but there because it’s always been. I am a philosophically-minded person, and I began making serious inquiries into the business of religion early on in my life (I spent a lot of time inside my own head). When the internet entered my existence, it simply spurred me to delve even deeper. I love these people, I would think, but they are wrong and sinners and going to suffer eternally, if what I was raised to believe is true. That didn’t sit well with me at all. I didn’t really want eternity, if it was going to be without the most interesting people I knew.
Long story short, the questioning has never stopped. I can’t bring myself to put blind faith into words written by men, chosen by men, and championed by men. I can’t see a good reason why Christianity, in the form I was taught or otherwise, has a monopoly on the truth. If God is in fact unknowable, then how can anyone claim to fully know God to the point that they can declare others’ versions of God wrong? I have yet to encounter someone with a satisfying answer.
And because of this questioning – because we no longer have an identical platform on which we stand to address issues – my family and I are in constant disagreement. My life choices are wrong on principle. I can’t get advice from my mother without it being accompanied by a Bible verse. Friends or significant others who haven’t fit the mold are already on the watch list. I feel I can no longer share my life without a family-wide breakdown or at the very least a novel-sized email conversation. At some point, I stopped buying into the philosophy for myself and started creating my own, and slowly but surely that tugged me away from what is supposed to be an everlasting support network. Even some of my friends have subtly turned on me because I no longer adhere to their “rules of proper lifestyle.” It’s sad and scary and a part of growing up I didn’t expect to have to do so dramatically.
And for that, I blame the internet.
