The Internet Actually

I have a repressed childhood. I was exposed to bullies, freeloaders, drug users, smokers, and all the scary sorts of people a fragile child should had not condemned just yet. I actually thought the world was a scary place. I was never comfortable with my peers, who were either harvesting boyfriends at the age of 10 or were already putting make-up on at the age of 11. Being a kid then felt like being a victim of a menacing tribe. Jaded by such environment, I opted most of the time to go through our dark Grade School halls alone. Books were somehow able to lug in entertainment to the drama of my life. Music wielded itself as amusement, but jaded, confused, and traumatized I was still.

Until the Internet took place.

I first experimented with the Internet when I checked out the website of my erstwhile best-loved band, The Moffatts. I had no idea what to expect from the website, but its message board was indeed able to lift my dampened spirit, for I was “meeting” with the band’s fans—my fellow aficionados—from all over the world. We gather merrily in the site as we discussed not only about the band but of our lives as well. Through the online friendships I have formed, I finally felt for the first time that my life was being acknowledged. I realized there are people like me as well, and there are lots of them; and it only took a timely discovery of the Internet for me to see that wonderful truth.

And as they say, one event in your life can change the rest. Yet in my case, I believe the Internet has done more than change. It started my life. Online experiences nourished my real-time relationships. From then on, I was eager to make friends, and the trauma my childhood experiences had brought me gradually wore off in time. The Internet has also allowed me to take into account a person’s soul, may it be through his or her writings or posted artworks. And as I, too, involve myself in the Net, I finally am in the same way bringing my innermost self into the open—a habit actually thought impossible when I was a kid.