return home / back to myworld

Around the same time I started puberty, the life I had known for the past six and a half years fell apart. Not a good combo. I changed schools, my parents got divorced, we had to move into a one-bedroom apartment where I shared a room with my sister (who is four years younger than me) after having had the luxury of my own bedroom and privacy for my whole life up until then.

The school change impacted me the most. I went from my safe haven of 100 or so kids from all over the world to a big, loud building of around 800 students spread across four floors. After so many years of socialising mostly in English, the Estonian slang spoken by my new peers was almost a foreign language to me. I knew how to speak Estonian with my mum, but talking to 11-12-year-olds is a whole other ballgame. The social rules were also different — this school had cliques and cool kids and uncool kids and bullies and the bullied. My shyness became full-blown social anxiety, always feeling like I was on the edge of making some fatal faux pas (torture if you’ve lived your life so far feeling easily liked), and I became a shell of my former self.

The only place I still felt safe in was the internet. I was already using my parents’ laptop to play games, chat with my friends (at a school of diplomats’ kids who were always leaving, we used Skype and Gmail to stay in touch. I got used to calculating timezones early) and read about my favourite popstars (does anyone else remember the old chatbox on avrillavigne.com?).

It was around age 11-12 that I started using the internet to socialise with random strangers. I was on pretty much every popular multiplayer game website of the late 2010s, but the most formative websites for me were Horse Isle, ourWorld and goSupermodel.

Horse Isle is a virtual world where you can capture and tame horses, have your own equestrian centre, interact and do quests for NPCs, and chat with other users. I was obsessed with this website and maintained a blog with my (IRL) friend where we posted guides for completing quests. Although I added friends and occasionally chatted with people, I mostly just enjoyed doing quests and looking at horses on here. 10/10 amazing early internet game that still exists.

ourWorld was a virtual world where you could customise your own avatar, explore, play games and chat with other users. I started playing on oW with IRL friends as well, but soon got way more into it than any of them and made my first real internet friends, one of whom I am still in contact with. I had a group of friends who we roleplayed as a “family” with. I was the daughter, and I remember the father being someone who claimed to be little-known musician Joe Brooks. To this day, I have no idea if it actually was him (he’s nowhere near famous enough for there to be any real benefit in pretending to be him), but I did genuinely get into his music, and we were good friends. Back then, it seemed totally normal for me, a 12-year-old girl, to be chatting and virtually hanging out with a 23-year-old guy, and nothing weird ever happened between us.

goSupermodel was where things really got serious. This was one of those 2000s doll websites, where one of the main points of the game was to earn money (through games or by making in-game purchases) and buy clothes to dress your avatar up in. But it also had a forum.

This forum was basically a proto-tumblr. It was a gathering of mostly teenage girls of all kinds of mental illnesses — I learnt so much about abnormal psychology and my own mental health just through being active on these forums. They also talked about sex and relationships, religion, politics, culture and media, pretty much anything lonely teenagers on the internet talk about. This was where I developed a political conscience, a sense of identity, an idea that maybe there was a reason I felt so out of place in this world these days.

I had done some online dating before on ourWorld, but nothing with any serious feelings involved. This changed with Tamara, a girl I met on goSupermodel. She was 15 (I was 12), American, bisexual and an unmedicated bipolar person. I told her I was straight and she kept pestering me until I decided it wouldn’t really matter if I dated a girl online because I never had to see her anyway (I remember this being my actual thought process).

Of course, she treated me like any toxic bipolar girlfriend would, and I became obsessed with her. I would write her name in hearts in my journals, and my heart would pound at the thought of anyone finding them and discovering that I was in love with another girl. I would run home from school, hoping to catch her before she had to go offline for the night (timezones, remember?). She would regularly disappear without a word for long periods of time, and I would be heartbroken. Then one day, I would recognise her in the forums again, under a new username but still clearly the same Tamara, and I would message her, and our whole thing would start again.

Remember how she was 15 and I was 12? Yeah. She was a horny teenager. I hadn’t reached a point where I had any interest in anything sexual yet.

Tamara used to love roleplaying. At some point, these roleplays started to become more sexual. I was scared but also couldn’t tell her to stop out of fear that she would leave me again, so I did what I could to smoothly steer the roleplay into safer territory.

The funny thing is, I remember finally seeing a photo of her one day and not even thinking she was pretty. But she still had a hold on me. We were on and off “girlfriends” for about a year, before she finally disappeared for good.

So that was my first toxic relationship. But I also made lots of good friends on goSupermodel! Many of them I am still friends with today, and have met in real life!

Gradually, everyone on gSm moved to Tumblr and Twitter, including me. I was on queer-leftist-depression-fandom Tumblr, obviously.

My first fandom was Jedward, the Irish pop-duo who sang Lipstick in Eurovision in 2011. I became immediately obsessed with them, followed every Jedward fan I could find on social media, and dedicated the next couple of years of my life to them. This was actually really fun because we had a local fandom and I made lots of IRL friends as well as online ones — one of the local fans was even someone I knew from gSm, though we had never spoken before. Two of my friends from school were also fans, so we became known as the crazy Jedward girls (we had our own fan Youtube channel and everything).

After that, I migrated to the British Youtuber fandom — charlieissocoollike, Alex Day (yes, I know), Dan and Phil, and my two forever favourites, crabstickz and hexachordal (who goes by Gem Milsom now). This is how I met my current friend and flatmate from Norway, and how I reconnected with an old friend from the international school who I ended up dating for a year (more on that soon). After that, Homestuck, where I again made loads of local friends, this time of the more queer variety. One of my most prized possessions that I have carried around with me over the years is a handmade stuffed doll of Sweet Bro from the Homestuck sub-web comic Sweet Bro & Hella Jeff that someone made me for the Homestuck Secret Santa we held one year. If you know, you know.

Point is, I made it through my depressed teenage years thanks to strangers online (some of whom are now my oldest friends) and various obsessions that I shared with said strangers. I remember not wanting to leave my bed most days. Even though I had friends at school, interacting with them IRL made me anxious and it often took a lot of effort to convince myself to go out to meet them. I didn’t enjoy school anymore. I had stopped reading books. My sleep schedule was horrible — I remember a period where every night, I would stay up until 3-4, wake up at 6 to go to school, come home and take a nap in the afternoon, and repeat.

I remember times when the gaping hole inside me ached so bad I just had to lie on the floor and cry silently, in the middle of the night.

I remember not wanting to get up to eat if it required any amount of preparation. I remember a week-long school break where I decided my goal was to reread Homestuck, so I stayed in bed for the next 9 days (at that point, it had around 5000 pages). I remember not brushing my teeth for days at a time, let alone showering.

Online, I felt safe. My friends there understood me. How could I tell my friends at school that I didn’t get out of bed all weekend because I was scrolling Tumblr and binge-watching Doctor Who?

I had a friend from the international school who still lived in Tallinn and was also active on Tumblr. One day, we started talking. One thing led to another, and a couple of weeks later, they came over to watch TV with me. Netflix and chill before Netflix was even a thing in Estonia. On our second date, they kissed me goodbye. It was my first kiss.

We were both 15, and had no real experience with relationships, so we discovered everything together. It was great. We were in love, we understood each other, we made each other happy. I came out to my school friends and they all accepted my partner into the friend group and I started to feel like I could actually breathe around people that I was seeing regularly for the first time in a long time.

My sister is actually who outed me to my parents — she walked in on us making out one day (shared bedroom, remember?), and threatened to tell our parents. I said “fine, whatever”. I was secretly scared, even though I knew it was unlikely anything bad would happen. They were both chill about it, and a weight was lifted off my shoulders.

I started going to more IRL queer community events around this time, too. The local LGBT centre started organising LGBT youth meetups, and I went to my first pride parade. It became an important part of my life and how I saw myself.

And of course, just as life was starting to feel good again, everything changed. We graduated from middle school. I got into one of the top high schools in the city, and my partner, who was a ballet dancer, got into one of the top ballet schools in the world — in Scotland. We swore to each other that we would stay together forever, but I still sent them to the airport in tears. Who knew what would happen now?