I – On the Invention of the Self
The internet, once a tool, now a theatre. We – unsupervised and emotionally unprepared – wondered with such youth amongst naivete of pioneers, building personalities from online profiles. Adolescence is an age old performance, we had found a bigger stage.
The curtain rises somewhere between a landline phone and the chat function of a game. The first generation to treat selfhood like a graphic design problem.
What version of myself do I want people to see.
No rehearsals. Only updates.
II – The Sacred Ritual
Logging on was spiritual. Sacred. A private passage to a very public realm. Our passwords – despite providing no security – held great personal significance. We entered them with reverence, fingers dancing across the keys as we tap into digital spaces more comforting than that of the dining room table.
Friendships formed without eye-contact.
A friend request as a declaration.
A message left on ‘seen’. A silent war.
Private lives, lived in public inboxes.
Three dots triggering anticipation, heartbreak, salvation. Or just LOL.
III – Observations on Teenage-hood
I remember a time in which a bathroom mirror selfie was the height of digital portraiture. With the flash on so bright your insecurities are hidden, the bodies of our youth plastered on Snapchat stories and Instagram feeds. Horrific really, to think that at the age of 13 we knew what angles made our stomachs look flatter and our bums bigger. We connected captions to these displays, like artists naming their masterpieces.
Private expressions compressed into 12-point font under a picture, shared to friends, family, and the strangers added through Facebook games.
Not so private anymore.
But we weren’t embarrassed.
It felt natural.
IV – On Loving Ghosts
Somewhere along the way, we developed crushes on people who didn’t know we existed. YouTubers. TikTokers. Twitter comedians who posted daily about iced coffee and despair.
We watched the same three-minute video of someone applying lip gloss in their bedroom every night before sleep.
We followed the romantic breakups of influencers like distant relatives going through divorce.
We called it content.
It was company.
We knew these people intimately.
They did not know us at all.
But that didn’t stop us from writing 500-word comments under their posts, or defending them in arguments with strangers, or crying when they posted an apology video in grayscale.
We weren’t friends.
But it felt like friendship.
And the feeling was enough.
13 year old girls are toxic. Liars. Backstabbers. They haven’t learnt the need for their peers. Haven’t felt the desperate desire for company, and so they claim deep love for their ‘besties’ and then neglect their relationships in favour of attention from teenage boys and likes on Instagram.
So we turned to content for comfort. The sound of a makeup tutorial or a ‘what’s in my bag’ lulling us to sleep.
V – Public Diaries
Coming of age online meant narrating our every thought in real-time.
Our pain, our joy, our McDonald’s orders—all shared.
We didn’t just experience adolescence; we live-blogged it.
We documented heartbreaks as they happened.
We posted vague quotes that hid the name but not the identity.
‘He knows what he did’
‘If you know, you know’
We had public breakdowns at 2 a.m. and posted selfies at 3.
We woke up in the morning to see our classmates had done the same – crying for attention, crying for help – by posting pictures of tears running down their face. One tap, and a sudden blanket of ignorance is thrown, the struggles hidden.
And when the feelings passed, we deleted the evidence.
Or we didn’t.
And the internet remembered.
The internet always remembers.
VI – Memory in the Age of Screenshots
Coming of age used to mean forgetting. Forgetting classroom conversations. Forgetting year 4 science projects. Forgetting the aches and pains of primary school romance.
Now it means archiving. Every message can be screen-captured. Every photo can be retrieved. Every mistake can be quote-tweeted with the caption: “This aged badly.”
We live inside a memory palace made of glass and pixels, visible to anyone who tries hard enough. Some doors we locked ourselves out of—lost email passwords, expired domains. Others were left wide open, inviting ghosts to visit unannounced.
We scroll back through our timelines and meet previous versions of ourselves.
The 2012 us with too much blush.
The 2015 us who was scared to lose friends.
The 2019 us who believed the world was ending (it sort of was).
It’s all still there, waiting, remembering. Holding onto our memories for us until we’re ready to relive them.
VII – Post-Growth Reflections
Now, we hover in adulthood.
Not quite influencers. Not quite anonymous.
Still refreshing. Still typing.
Still hoping our posts mean something to someone. That the memory of our adventures will be cemented in the algorithm, for us to look back on.
We’ve learned to read between the lines:
The friend who posts memes about burnout is likely burnt out.
The person who vanishes from socials probably needs someone to notice.
The silence, too, is a kind of post.
Coming of age online was not great.
It did not happen in three acts.
There was no music swell at the end.
Just a quiet understanding that we grew up while the internet watched—and sometimes clapped.
We are still logging in.
Still learning what to share, what to save, and what to delete.
Still learning what we want people to see and what we don’t.
Still coming of age.
Just with better lighting and worse attention spans.
Xoxo Sara.