There are so many selves we create in order to live our lives easily: as a child, as a sibling, as a student, as a friend, as an employee… When I was younger, I struggled with understanding who I am and what it meant to be me. Teenhood was complicated, as I know it is for almost everyone, but for me this was compounded by my introduction to the internet.
It’s impossible for identity to be formed in a vacuum. I found a new world online and a new me to match. With social media, I learned about the existence of people that were only whispered about. I learned a whole new vocabulary with words like LGBT, feminism, late-stage capitalism. I finally had the freedom outside of my hyper-conservative religious community to explore myself without their supervision or approval.
I started to live a double life as a good, God-fearing daughter offline, and someone else online. Someone undefinable and unable to be understood by my parents or any of my old friends. It felt like I was being split in two. How could I ever reconcile these identities? How could I be two people in the same body?
In 2018, I was a senior in high school. I watched Love, Simon with another closeted friend and we cried when Simon’s mother accepted him. We told our mothers that day that we watched Black Panther again.
Eventually, there was one self I considered real and one I considered fake, but it didn’t happen instantly. I still think of that time spent floating in limbo, and wonder how I managed to make it out in one piece.
Being online did more than help me create a new identity, it gave me a way to escape from my body. I’m only now starting to deal with the repercussions of this.
It was easier to change my profile instead of changing my clothes. I spent hours customizing themes and creating perfect icons but I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror, disgusted with the results of my new sedentary lifestyle.
For all the better I am internally now, I feel like my addiction to the internet in my teens ruined my relationship with my body. It gave me a place where my body didn’t matter, and it’s only recently that I realized the downsides of that fact.
I’m working to reconnect with it, but it’s hard. What once was one is now two. I’m still trying to find my way home and most likely will be for a very long time.
Unruly Bodies 
This experience is one I think many people can relate to in some way or another. I myself learned about these exact same things during my teen years. I experienced an online community that embraced me more than the people in my high school never did. While I never experienced the mind body spilt I can completely understand how it could happen. With being two different people on and off the internet the idea that your internet self no longer associates with the physical body but actually views the page as your new body. Taking care of and changing your online page to represent who you are when you could not do that to the physical. Your experience is meaningful in that it shaped your teenage years and that it shows how powerful the mind is
I did not realize until reading this post that the way that I felt about the internet could be articulated with words! You expressed exactly how I feel about my extremely intimate (duh) relationship with my body and my ever growing intimate relationship with the internet. I still don’t know if my relationship with the internet can technically be considered an addiction, although I do view it that way privately. The anonymity of the internet gives me a host body in a way. A mind with no body? Something like that… something that gives me a mind/body split on top of my irl mind/body split. So two minds one body, both minds are separate entities. Separate identities. Sorry for the rambling but I experience this as well and I’m glad to see someone put it into words! Thank you for sharing!