a space for my teenage self

In the summer of 2008, when Prince Caspian had just been released in theaters, I joined a forum called Narniaweb to process my feelings about the movie. As I revisit my teenage self and watch lots of different high school movies and things I liked in high school, I sometimes feel a little allienated because due to being homeschooled I didn’t really have a core group of people to be with or to do projects with or to make friends with in person, because also in high school was when my family had a collective mental breakdown and so the non-educational parts of my development was not necessarily a priority. 

But I remembered then that I was part of a community, and I grew up on the internet on a discussion forum. I’ve traded stories with friends who also grew up in chatrooms, but this was different than logging into AOL or reddit and getting to curse. It was actually a community. I made friends on there. There were rules, some kinda homophobic and some kinda restricting but some that did make it a very safe place for young kids and teenagers to interact with each other. I had someone send me a Secret Santa gift that was, to date, one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever gotten. The people who I talk to from this website, the ones that ended up also growing outside of conservative values and being more open minded and also not necessarily being weird about the fact I wasn’t white (something lots of people didn’t know until we friended each other on Facebook or met in person!), are actually still some of my best friends. 

These were the friends who I made vlogs with. Who I got jealous and kinda fought with. Who I had crushes on. We had this long standing relationship. I have a few in my life who we still talk regularly and still get along, and it’s wild to me, we’ve known each other since we were 12 and almost always, when I met people from Narniaweb, we clicked in person immediately and enjoyed each others’ company. 

I don’t know if I say I miss having that space, because life has changed so much. COVID made me revisit socializing like this because so much of how we connected with our loved ones was through screens. But for me, building community through forums was how I learned friendship. I didn’t really learn a lot of problem solving or conflict resolution skills when it came to friendship. This forum taught me a lot of that, as well as also how to hear other people’s points of views and express my own, because the forum had several threads for debates of different kinds. The most heated one was the Christianity, Religion, And Philosophy thread where the outliers of us homeschooled evangelical & Catholic kids would go to pour out our secret questions against our religious uprbinging. sometimes we’d get talked down and over by people whose whole life was Calvinistic theology. One friend of mine actually made a whole different account, posing as an athiest, as an outlet for his doubt, and it was a huge scandal on the forum for a minute.