Why do I still act like Twitter is my diary?

I got a Twitter account in early 2009, and I was still in high school. It was my second social media account, a secret one, in an era where I was blogging on a Flickr account via 365 day challenges, when I’d recall my Livejournal and Neopets accounts every few months (sorry Bruce the penguin), and my communication lifeblood was still AIM chatting on my emo handle and meticulously designing away messages posted by my moody numberless username to feature the perfect background text highlight, font, spacing, and ASCII art.

There are so many opportunities and things my parents did right, and they kept their eyes on the prize helping my sister and I get to college and get scholarships. I got full tuition covered at a SUNY school and am fortunate I had minimal debt from room and board, from a time where I was still developing financial literacy (I got my checking book at 16 and went to university at 17).

I was raised in a pretty cloistered home. I started part time work at 14, I was always in after school plays, in a half dozen clubs with a handful of leadership positions, pushing teachers for after school help with my coursework from a year ahead of my age. But I didn’t see friends much. I think I’d refer to my family as isolationist. There is a default position to be protective and sceptical, where trust is earned. It took a long time to be trusted to go to different homes, make new friends, ride in vehicles with others or even their parents. I was asked the names of everyone present. I was given a cellphone in high school for the purpose of checking in on where I was (and the luck of calling for a ride if I missed a bus). Once texting was a thing, my parents read them. It contributed to a “break up” with a boy who I met in line from my first concert at 16 who went to another school, who drove by and stashed letters and bags of Reese’s in my mailbox that I’d sneak out to get.

This background is to say I wasn’t socialized in the same ways as many peers around me, and I felt monitored and stuck in my home. But after begging and convincing my parents that I needed a laptop to work as hard at my studies and not alternate with my sister, and to aid me in building graphic design skills that would help me for college (I made a PowerPoint to sell my parents on my studying art at college, but that’s a whole separate story), I got the unfathomable: a laptop. My laptop. A portal.

I had a secret Facebook account that I’d made after a summer camp musical a three years earlier to keep in touch with friends from other schools. My mom found it after a few months and made me delete it. I cried a long time. I learned.

I knew how to background and hide windows. Writing outlines from textbooks for AP History classes was already a multi hour affair, so what if there was AIM and a few browsers shrunk in the back. I wiped Internet history. When that got too conspicuous, I researched and found out about private browsing mode. The computer was a portal into communication, the slow build of friendship, broader perspectives and experience.