who am i without the internet?

on forming an identity based on people i come across online and other things

a young Miranda Cosgrove as her character Megan on Drake & Josh, sitting at her computer and smirking deviously

When I was around five years old, I used a computer for the first time. My brother and I sat together at our family’s clunky off-white Windows 95 in our tiny living room that doubled as my parents’ bedroom. I craned my neck to see the cyan screen with icons that held little worlds inside that could be accessed with just a click. We were waiting for our mom to finish using the phone so my brother could log on to Internet Explorer because you couldn’t do both at the same time back then. My brother taught me how to write my name using MS Paint.

I grew a little older and the computer became my refuge for playing various games, like pinball, solitaire, Sims 1, and those random games you could find on DVDs when you inserted them into your computer (2005’s Madagascar comes to mind, though I can’t remember exactly what the game was). Then, one glorious day in elementary school, my class was taken to the trailer where the library was held, and inside the library were brand-new white MacBooks that had just replaced our mixed selection of old blue iMacs and black Dell desktops, undoubtedly earned thanks to a grant. Once a week for Computer Lab, we’d play games on websites like FunBrain and Poptropica. The 40 minutes we were given were never enough, especially when trying to solve those Poptropica islands. So I’d go home and try to get the game to work on the Windows 95 we were still using.

The older I got, the more internet access I had, so I spent all of it on kids’ sites like My Scene, Disney Channel Games, and dressupgames.com, which required some questionable downloads of Flash and Java. Then I turned twelve and discovered websites aimed at older users that had a larger focus on the social aspect of being online. Meez, IMVU, MySpace, and YouTube were beginning to take off. Instead of getting lost in games, I was getting lost in constructing the perfect profile and creating the perfect avatar. As a shy little girl with social anxiety and a big imagination, these customizable aspects allowed me to experiment with different styles and present myself any way I wanted.

On the flip side, I had access to others on a scale that no one could imagine yet, a scale that only grew bigger as YouTube exploded, Tumblr became the new MySpace (and then took on a new, weird life of its own that’s still discussed in the cultural zeitgeist today), and Instagram was a few years ahead of its peak. In just a few clicks, I could be down a rabbit hole of emo teens giving raccoon eye-makeup tutorials or reblogging song lyrics pasted onto aesthetic pastel grunge photos. I could enter the worlds of others all from the comfort of my home.

I’ve been into YouTube ever since I discovered Michelle Phan’s makeup tutorials in 2009. Over the years I came across all kinds of content creators who could teach me how to put on makeup and dye my hair, tell me where to buy the cutest clothes, and make me jealous of their bedrooms during room tours. But it wasn’t just the material items that I was drawn to. I fell in love with the creators themselves, admiring their looks and personalities and wishing I could be friends with them or even be them. The more I watched them, the more I consciously and subconsciously tried them on for myself, from their style to their mannerisms, jokes, and even their social media habits. If I noticed that they didn’t post often on social media, I’d think they were so mysterious and wanted to emulate this perceived mystery for myself. It’s not like I was pretending–I never tried anything I didn’t think I would like–but it was almost as if I could become them or have their life if I made myself more like them. Of course, I only saw what they presented to me, so this emulation was only ever surface-level and never lasted long.

I’d say they inspired me and that’s why I wanted to look like them and be like them so much, but at what point does inspiration devolve into imitation?

With the rise of visual and social media over the years, we are exposed and influenced in ways our older siblings, parents, and grandparents never were and never will be, because much of this exposure has happened to us at young, impressionable ages. If they wanted to look or be like a celebrity, they’d have to wait for an exclusive magazine interview or analyze pap shots and red-carpet photos. Now, if we want this, all we have to do is look at their social media accounts, where we’re given access to a plethora of content about their daily lives. And it’s not just limited to celebrities. If we want to look or be like anyone, all we have to do is hope our eyes come across an active social media account.

I’ve had Facebook since I was 13 and mostly used it to play Farmville and stalk older girls I knew who I thought were so cool. But Instagram changed everything when it arrived. With its sole focus on images, creating an online persona for myself became even more important. I was required to wear a uniform at school, so I couldn’t fully express myself there, and I was still too shy to join in with the people who weren’t my friends. Posting online allowed me to express myself in ways I couldn’t in real life, and this really took off for me on Instagram because it was one of the few social media accounts I had that my parents didn’t know about. Not that I was posting anything inappropriate, but it’s just nice to know that your mom isn’t watching all the time. With Instagram’s hyperfocus on the visual, I’d meticulously plan my feed to be cohesive and match whatever aesthetic I was trying to go for.

This is where everything I’d absorbed from content creators and other people I followed spilled out. It was one thing to emulate them in my daily life, and another thing to post it on the internet. Because, as mentioned above, I wanted everything to be cohesive. So when styles or personality traits I picked up didn’t match the online presence I was aiming for, I was left feeling like I was in the middle of an existential crisis. How can I be this and that when the internet tells me this and that don’t go together?¹

This was only made worse when TikTok came around. TikTok didn’t start the packaging of aesthetics (I’d argue that Tumblr did) but it has exacerbated it in a way no one was prepared for. Now, everywhere you look on social media, you’ll see the different ways we are encouraged to pick apart our identities and package them in a little bow for consumption on the internet. Everything is an aesthetic or trend. Ballet core. Sad girl. Downtown girl. Grunge. Pastel grunge. Goth. E-girl. Tomato girl. Coquette. Model off duty. Cottage core. Clean girl. The Glossier girl. Dark academia. We are inundated with trends and aesthetics that are created by internet users and then picked up by brands to market back to us, perpetuating a cycle of creating and consuming like never before. I feel like all I have to do is think about trying out a Y2K aesthetic and suddenly I find ads for sparkly lipgloss and Juicy sweats knock-offs. And there’s nothing wrong with this to a certain degree. Trends are fun. Aesthetics are fun. They’re a great way to become inspired and find friends with similar interests.

But when it comes to how I want to present myself online, I have a plethora of options and no clear direction. My digital self lives outside my actual self. Not to say that I’m faking anything, but how we are perceived online is out of our control to a degree. And this digital self vs my actual self comes back into play when I feel like I can’t cohesively fit all of the aesthetics I’m interested in online because they’re not able to be packaged neatly. There are days when I want to wear all black and blast Evanescence. There are days when I want to wear pink and tie bows in my hair. This wouldn’t matter as much if I didn’t want to post online as much as I do, but I guess you could say I’m trying to become a content creator of some sort. Not professionally, but it is a hobby of mine and I’d like to be able to have a nice platform for when I finally publish that damn novel. But how do I gain an audience if I don’t have a cohesive aesthetic? The most successful content creators do.

This brings me back to my original question. The content I make is inspired by the content creators I follow. How much of it is inspiration and how much of it is imitation? I use my social media as if it’s a mix between a personal diary, a place to be creative, and a mood board. I’ll post what I’m up to, or create a photoshoot surrounding a new dress I bought, or any pretty things I see that I think would make for an aesthetic photo. And a lot of my photo ideas come from what I see others do. Sometimes I can’t get in the right mood to create a good TikTok until I imagine myself as one of my favorite Tiktokers. How would they do it? What sound would they use? Again, I never post anything I don’t like or that doesn’t feel like me. But sometimes I feel like everything I post is just derivative. How can I look healthily within myself to create and post something truly authentic to me? This thought bleeds into my writing as well, but that’s a discussion for another day.

With this inspiration comes the inevitable ego death. When so much of what I look like and create comes from seeing someone else do it, I inevitably end up comparing myself to them. And this comparison is always in their favor, never mine. So then I get upset with myself for trying at all because of course I couldn’t do or look as good as them.

With all of the different trends and aesthetics to choose from comes the pressure to reinvent ourselves when we discover new things we like. Which is normal, but I think it takes an extreme form online. As I said before, our digital selves live outside our actual selves. We can never just grow and evolve naturally online. If who we are now doesn’t fit the aesthetic of who we were yesterday, then we must hit delete! In the past, when I’ve discovered new interests, tried out a new aesthetic, or just grew as a person, I succumbed to the urge to delete everything that didn’t resonate with the new person I wanted to be because it didn’t fit visually (for the most part-some of this deleting was due to less superficial factors). I think this pressure to reinvent and this desire to delete uniquely falls on girls more than boys because one, let’s face it, girls run the internet, and two, when so much of our online presence is tied to how we look, then how else would girls in a patriarchal, misogynistic, sexist, and vapid society express themselves? I’ve become better at resisting the urge to delete everything in recent years and now try to look at my social media as an evolution of myself.

Lastly, I wonder about the person I’d be without the internet in terms of productivity and personal development. I briefly touched on the subject of picking up jokes and mannerisms from content creators. The internet as a whole is rife with memes, jokes, and references only those chronically online would understand. I’ve discovered and met some great people on here. This is one of the greatest things about it. But who would I be if I didn’t spend all this time online? Would I be happier with my life if I wasn’t constantly exposed to others? I haven’t even touched on the actual dangers of being chronically online, like how it can cause a cycle of loneliness and isolation, and how we see the horrors of the world every single day. Mainly because, since I am insufferable, this is a shallow post about me!

At the risk of sounding like that annoying kid in Philosophy 101, sometimes I think I’m forgetting how to exist offline. I reach for my phone at the slightest incident of boredom or discomfort. I spend hours on YouTube or scrolling through Instagram when there are a million other things I could be doing (like writing that damn novel). I’m always thinking about my next Instagram post or when I can film a TikTok. With social media being the way it is now, there’s a blurred line between posting online and creating content; everything is content, whether you intend it to be or not. God, what did people do before the internet when they had a cute outfit on? Just go about their day? How sad.

I probably would be very different if I didn’t have the internet but, even though it’s definitely exacerbated it, I don’t think that would’ve stopped this absorption and emulation of mine. Because when I was ten, I read the Heartland books and became a #HorseGirl. When I was eleven, I hid snacks in my room like Claudia, my favorite character in The Babysitter’s Club. Watching Ugly Betty ignited my dream to become a fashion editor in NYC. In one year alone, I went from dyeing my hair orange and reciting every word of Paramore’s live album The Final Riot! to dyeing my hair red and speaking in a higher pitch like Cat Valentine to turning my hair into a black bob, dressing bohemian, and cracking sarcastic jokes like Alex Russo. Because everything comes from something. To (fittingly) quote the internet: I’ve never had an original thought or experience.

I do feel like I am closer to who I am meant to be. Actually, I take that back, because saying that I’m closer implies that I was once farther, and I’d prefer to look at all of these phases of mine as pieces of myself that shape who I am now. Because even if I don’t resonate with those phases anymore, they were true to me at the time. The internet is a vast, wonderful, scary place and for better or worse, I am who I am because of it. Some of my habits definitely need to change, but that’s a battle for another day. And if you’re reading this and wondering why I don’t just delete my social media: what are you, crazy?

Thanks for reading! This kind of feels like a self-absorbed I-am-14-and-this-is-deep sorta post but this topic has been on my mind a lot recently. I’d love to hear any of your experiences with trying to form an identity with the internet. If you’d like to read some related posts of mine about the internet and social media, check out “the mysterious main character who romanticizes her life” and “the truth behind my main character summer.”

1. my experience of this is through the lens of a cis straight white girl, so my experience of feeling like parts of myself don’t fit with each other is nothing compared to what it’s like for marginalized groups who’ve spent their whole lives fighting stereotypes about them that dictate what they can and can’t like. My experience is very surface-level compared to theirs and it would feel wrong to not acknowledge that.