I Regret My Time on The Internet

Dial-up internet became popular and increasingly available when I was 14 and a freshman in high school. There may be a few things that I miss about those days of AOL chat rooms, tacky Geocities pages, and ICQ instant messages, but there was a whole lot of crap to wade through, too. Kids, people — we were never prepared for all of that. I grew up very sheltered in some ways with a strict evangelical upbringing from my single mother, yet in other ways, I was overexposed to adult problems and deep generational traumas like poverty, domestic violence, drug addiction, incarceration, and sexual abuse. There were very few adults for me to go to for wisdom or guidance, and very few friends who ever got a glimpse of our bizarre home life. From a very young age, I’d say I was quietly “needy.” I constantly searched for an escape from my dysfunctional family. If I developed a strong connection to someone, especially a man, I often thought it meant more than it meant to them. Instead of talking about any of these issues, my mother shamed me for having feelings at all. She said I was broken, and would “always look for validation from boys and men” because my dad had given me “a spirit of rejection.” My sister, five years older than me, was more rebellious and from what I could tell, more “worldly.” She and my mom fought often, and our mother complained that she couldn’t control her. <a href="https://medium.com/grief-book-club/i-regret-my-time-on-the-internet-30110f62ffde">Click Here</a>