Twitter is a magical place. It’s a place where you can say anything, nudity is encouraged, and there are few rules, a seemingly lawless land in the world of social media apps. It’s definitely my favorite. People think I’m joking when I say it, but I’m being serious. I can’t adequately explain how much X has changed my life for the better. Though I experienced some of the worst harassment of my life there and many others have had horrible experiences, for me, it’s a place I feel like I can be entirely myself. A place where I’m never alone.
I was raised by a family that wanted me to be quiet. I was the youngest of 3, born to parents who divorced before my 2nd birthday. My dad remarried when I was 4 years old. My parents were often occupied, trying their best to juggle their lives and relationships and interpersonal nightmares. My dad, like my husband and brother, was a cruel and violent alcoholic who only knew how to blame others for his actions. One of my earliest memories was my older sister calling 911 because my dad and stepmom were arguing and someone threw a vase that broke against the wall. From a young age, my siblings and I learned that the best thing we could be was invisible.
My single mom ran a home daycare to provide for the three of us and send us to Catholic school. I learned I could avoid her sometimes terrifying temper if I could sit still, be quiet, go be alone in my room and read a book by myself. I would disappear for hours into a fantasy world all of my creation, my imagination taking me to lands far, far away. I always felt like the vivid worlds inside my head and the books I read was where I truly belonged, and I was forced to live in a reality that was sadly very different. In my childhood, I felt like I was a bother, like my existence was inconvenient for everyone.
As a kid, I couldn’t see how hard my mom struggled raising 3 kids and running daycare while dealing with my alcoholic father. It makes sense that she wanted me to manage my own shit. She had enough to handle, and while maybe she loved me deep down in her heart, her actions and her words said something else. That she wished I wasn’t so needy, so willful, so stubborn, so wiggly. Why am I always wiggling? I was an anxious child and obviously neurodivergent. I need to talk a lot to process what’s happening around me, so I have always been chatty. I wanted and needed her attention, but she had so many other things that pulled at her. I was in constant competition for her time with my siblings, the daycare kids, her own personal happiness. I compulsively twisted and ripped my hair out when I was 5 years old, leaving a bald spot at the back of my head. She was ashamed of the way it looked and angry at me, and despite my loud and vehement protests that I did not want short hair, just before I started Kindergarten she had it cut short. From then on, I learned to sit on my hands.
I moved out of my mother’s house when I was 18, and relocated to the biggest nearby city to go to the University. My brother lived near the dorms, and “took care of me” by buying me booze and introducing me to his housemates, who would immediately try to sleep with me. He worked at a liquor store and bought alcohol for me and my friends, even hosting a keg party for my 19th birthday at his house.
I made infrequent calls home, and at age 20 met and fell in love with a man I became completely infatuated with.
My mother didn’t like him and thought he was just like my father. Deeply entrenched in my own alcoholism and codependency and feeling like someone actually paid attention to me for the first time, I didn’t listen. I saw her as the villain. I thought she hated him because he was a liberal and an atheist, he ate organic food and didn’t wear deodorant. He was different than people in North Dakota. He helped paint her as the bad guy, insisting she had never loved me, never wanted me. I couldn’t help but assume he was right. Why else would she be so mean to my new husband? A few years into our marriage, we stopped visiting my family entirely.
I never thought I was being abused. Just like I didn’t think it was rape. I would never describe my childhood or my marriage as abusive. I didn’t see how the way my parents treated me shaped how I would marry someone who was much the same. Someone whose happiness I prioritized above all else, someone I tiptoed around to keep happy at all times, someone with an explosive temper that felt just like home. I didn’t see how that he controlled every decision I made, holding his barely controlled rage as the hostage he would let out of the cage if I upset him. He isolated me not just from my family but drove wedges into my friendships as well. He controlled everything I did, what I ate, where I went. Our finances were all shared, he policed my social media.
It was as my marriage was falling apart during the pandemic when I secretly joined Twitter and first started to write posts that he couldn’t see. Online, I unlocked a whole new version of myself. For the first time, I could say whatever I wanted. I could post about books and movies and music I liked, and instead of being told I had bad taste, I was instead met with people who agreed with me and liked the same things as me. My new friends found me interesting. People told me I was funny. I made friends and gained followers and got added to chat rooms telling funny stories to people that wanted to hear what I had to say. At home, he was always telling me to get to the point, “Tell the short version, Chicken.” Like my mother, he always wanted me to be quiet.
As my secret online persona, people loved my rambling stories and lengthy posts. It was transformative. I got added to DM rooms and made close friendships online. While telling an anecdote from my childhood about how I used to hide in the clothing racks at stores to avoid my mother’s wrath, someone pulled me aside into a separate message and said with care, “hey, that sounds really traumatic. Have you been to therapy?”
I laughed it off. Me? Need therapy? My childhood was not traumatic. I was shocked that someone thought I needed to talk to a therapist based on a story that I thought was funny. The conversation stayed with me.
In DMs and texts that led eventually phone calls and plane rides, I developed a secret relationship with a man online who became my lover in real life. In the arms of a young 6’4 man who worked in finance, I felt safe to talk about my marriage. Commiserating with him about his own struggling relationship, I spoke for the first time about the way my husband treated me, the way he spoke to me, how truly unhappy I was, how I felt invisible.
Instead of the expected “aww, that sucks, we should both get divorced and run away together,” I was shocked at his response:
“That sounds like abuse. You don’t deserve to be treated like that. Do you have a therapist?”
Again, I laughed it off. It wasn’t that bad. Dave was not abusing me; he was bothering me. Abuse looks very different. I’m a confident and smart woman. I was adamant that my marriage sucked, yes, but it was far from abuse.
But I couldn’t avoid the fact that on Twitter, I was a different person.
Stepping into the shoes of Julie, I could post and say and be anything I wanted. Online, I was a completely different version of myself. I would post something mundane: a passing song lyric, a picture of my garden, an anecdote about my dog, or a selfie and people would respond. People asked me questions, they wanted to get to know me. For the first time in my life, I started to feel like people liked me. Like it was ok to take up space. To post my thoughts without editing. I was amazed to find that people laughed at my jokes, that people thought I was charming and had an interesting life.
Instead of talking down to me about topics like gardening or music, men asked me questions and wanted me to teach them things. While certainly some of it was flattery in the name of seeing me naked, some of it was sincere. The connections felt genuine.
I realized that at home, I was always being told to tell the short version of every story. He talked down to me, insisting that no one interrupt him when he was speaking. He made fun of me for the college I went to, the music I listened to, the colors that I liked. After reading (without my permission) the collection of stories I wrote after we sold the record store, he told me that I’m not funny and no one would ever want to read a book I’d written. He tore me down constantly, eroding my confidence until I was a shred of myself.
While slowly coming to the realization I needed to get out of my marriage, I devoted more and more time to my online persona. I felt alive, like Julie was the real me that had always lived only in my chest and she had been given a voice for the first time. It was like the fantasy worlds I built in my youth had burst into living color. I wore pretty floral dresses (instead of ankle length skirts and hoodies he preferred) and took pictures and wrote lengthy posts whenever we weren’t together.
When I discovered the joys of getting naked on the internet, I felt reborn. Men tripped over themselves to tell me how hot I was, how gorgeous I looked, how sexy the stretch marks are. The saggy tits and mombod he insisted I cover up was somehow suddenly the source of hundreds of men’s fantasies, plus thousands of dollars for me. It was revolutionary. I felt adored. I felt loved.
After a lifetime of being told to be quiet, to be still, to stop talking, to cover up, I was suddenly surrounded by an online fanclub that hung on my every word. I took to tweeting my thoughts all day long, finding it entertaining how people respond to my random musings, particularly when it had nothing to do with the nude content whatsoever. I found deep connection by sharing with people and being vulnerable with strangers.
After he died, my identity shifted. It was subtle at first, but the shift accelerated and after two years, I finally feel like I am one person. I no longer disappear into my online persona to hide from my real life, and instead feel like online I am the same person I am in real life. I’m no longer scared to speak my mind or embarrassed to have bad taste. Because of my internet friends, I’m not scared to show people my true self, even the weird stuff. Especially the weird stuff.
Social media is the great equalizer. I’m staggered and grateful for the things people are willing to share with me, and the people who have been generous and kind enough to lead me out of a dark and terrifying place. By allowing me the space to be myself, I found community in an unlikely place. More than anything else, I have found a group of people who are weird in all the ways that I am weird, and instead of being an isolating experience, it feels expansive. I see it happening all over the world, whatever strange niche you’re into you can find a group of people on some app that are just as strange as you. Through deep and shared connection, I have learned that I am not as weird as I always thought. But more importantly, I am not alone.
I hope you decide to write the book. 🙂
Laura
I have enjoyed learning about you thru your own eyes, you have come a long ways from the person you once was and have been thru a lot on that journey, the childhood you indured, abuse you suffered, the lost of a person, the pain you suffered after, to truly grown into the amazing sexy woman that you are today and hope that in the future you find the love you deserve with a good man, and that he treats you the way you deserve to be treated, wish I could be the person but know it's just not meant to be, for you to know I love you and admire you as a strong independent woman, take care