I was always a pretty good kid: good-natured, good in school, imaginative, and curious. I’d get up early every day to draw comic books before school; during the breaks between lessons on the school playground, I’d pretend I was putting on plays for astronauts. Afterwards, I’d muck about on our 8-bit computer, writing stories or small BASIC programs. I was a weird kid, for sure - nerdy long before it was cool, the third culture child of activist hippies - but relatively happy with it. I had a good childhood that I mostly remember very fondly.

Becoming a teenager also meant becoming the owner of a dark cloud that no-one else could see, which seemed to grow every day. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I would wake up some days without any energy or motivation at all. Sometimes, cycling home from my high school along the Marston Ferry Road in Oxford, a trunk road on one side and fields of cows on the other, I’d just stop. It was as if I was unable to move my feet on the pedals. I described it at the time as feeling like my blood had suddenly turned to water. There was nothing left inside me to go.

That feeling of nothingness inside me, like my fire had gone out, came into focus before I graduated from high school. I felt wrong. There was something irretrievably wrong about me - no, wrong with me - and everybody knew it, and nobody would tell me what it was.

At the same time, I discovered the internet. Whereas I’d come home as a kid to draw and write, as a teenager I’d connect to our dial-up Demon Internet connection and sync my emails and newsgroup posts before logging off again. I learned to build websites as a way to express myself. (Here’s one of my interminable and not-just-a-little-toxic teenage poetry collections, preserved for all eternity on the Internet Archive. You’re welcome.) Most importantly of all, I connected with new friends who were my age, over usenet newsgroups and IRC: two text mediums.

Somehow, when I was connecting with people over text, in a realm where nobody could see me or really knew what I looked like, I felt more free to be myself. Even when I met up with my fellow uk.people.teens posters - our collective parents were somehow totally fine with us all traveling the country to meet strangers by ourselves - I felt more like I could be confidently me, perhaps because I had already laid the groundwork of my friendships in a way that I had more control over. My family has always felt safe to me because I could just be me around them. I had a core group of very close school friends too, who I’m friends with to this day; people who I felt like didn’t judge me, and who I could feel safe around. In more recent years, some of those close friends have veered into conservative Jordan Peterson territory and anti-inclusion rhetoric, and it’s felt like a profound violation of that safety to a degree that I haven’t been able to fully explain until recently.

My connection to the internet - as in my personal connection, the emotional link I made with it - came down to that feeling of safety. I used my real name, but there was a pseudonymity to it; I was able to skate past all the artifice and pressure to conform of in-person society that had led me to feel wrong in the first place. On the web, I didn’t have that feeling. I could just be a person like everybody else. Being present in real life was effort; being online was an enormous weight off my shoulders.

Perhaps the reason I’ve come back to building community spaces again and again is because I remember that feeling of connecting for the first time and finding that the enormous cloud hanging over me was missing. That deep connection between people who have never met is still, for me, what the internet is all about. Or to put it another way, I’m constantly chasing that feeling, and that’s why I work on the internet.

Likewise, that’s what I’m looking for from my in-person connections. I want to feel like I can be me, and that I will be loved and accepted as I am. While I’ve found that in connections with all kinds of people, I’ve most often found that to be true in queer spaces: in my life, the people who have had to work to define their own identity are the most likely to accept people who don’t fit in.

It’s important to me: that deep, dark feeling of wrongness has never gone away. It’s under my skin at the office; it’s behind my eyes at family gatherings; it’s what I think about when I wake up at three in the morning. If we’re friends or family or lovers, I want to feel safe with you. I want to know that you accept me despite the wrongness, whatever the wrongness might be.

It might be that the relief the internet gave me also delayed my reconciliation with what the wrongness actually was.

When I was six years old, I cried and cried because my mother told me I wouldn’t grow up to be a woman. The feeling of not wanting to be myself has been with me as long as I can remember. I found beauty in people who were not like myself. There was much to aspire to in not being me.

Puberty gave me, to be frank, enormous mass. I was taller than everyone else, bigger than everyone else, by the time I was eleven or twelve. I towered over everyone by the time I was fourteen. I was bigger and hairier and smellier. In adulthood, the way one ex-girlfriend described it, my body isn’t just taller: it’s like someone has used the resize tool in Photoshop and just made me bigger, proportionally. I was never thin or athletic or dainty; I suddenly ballooned like the Incredible Hulk, but without the musculature.

I had felt wrong in my body before. Now, there was more of my body - a lot more - to feel wrong in.

So much of that dark cloud was my discomfort with my physicality: the meatspace experience of living as me. People started to tell me that I was easy to find in crowds, or made fun of the bouncy walk I developed as my limbs grew. They meant nothing by it, but it cut deep.

To this day, I recoil when I see a photo of myself alongside someone else. I hate it: there’s always this enormous dude ruining a perfectly good picture. It doesn’t even feel like me; it’s akin to when Sam Beckett looks into the mirror in Quantum Leap, or when Neo sees the projection of himself in The Matrix: Resurrections. The word, I’ve learned, is dysphoria.

I don’t know where to take that, or what it really means. I feel intense discomfort with my body and the physical manifestation of myself in the world. It’s not necessarily gender dysphoria - I don’t know - but it’s dysphoria nonetheless. I hate my body and it doesn’t feel like me.

What now?

The advent of the commercial internet must have been solace for a great many people in this way. It’s not unreasonable to say that it saved my life: not necessarily because I would have killed myself (although there have been times in my life, particularly when I was younger, when I’ve thought about it), but because I wouldn’t have found a way to build community and live with the authentic connections I did. I would have been hiding, fully and completely. Everyone deserves to not hide.

But because I’ve been living with one foot outside of the physical world, it’s also taken me a long time to understand that my feeling of wrongness was so tied into my physicality, and that my need to present differently was so acute.

I actually felt a little relief last year when I dyed my hair electric blue on a whim: it felt right in a way I wasn’t used to, perhaps because it was something under my control, or perhaps because it was a signal that I wasn’t the person I felt I had presented as up to then. The blue has long since faded and grown out into highlights, but some sense of the relief it brought remains. I have to wonder how I would feel if I did more to my body, and what it would take to make that dark cloud go away for good.

I think feeling good - no, feeling right - involves embracing that the feeling I’ve been experiencing my whole life is valid, and then exploring what it means in the real world. You’ve got to face it; you’ve got to give it a name.

There’s a TikTok trend that uses a line from a MGMT song to make a point about closeted queerness: ‌Just know that if you hide, it doesn't go away. It’s clear to me that the internet has been a godsend for people who don’t feel like they fit in, who need to find community that is nurturing for them, and who need to explore who they are. Removing that cognitive cloud is no small thing. But the next step is still the hardest: figuring out who you are, and finding out how to be yourself.