The Joyful Complexity of Internet Friendship

The ultimate touchstone is witness

I was born at the turn of the millennium, which means I grew up with the Internet. It started with Saturday morning Webkinz and sending my school friends chain emails. Commercials always instructed: Ask for parents’ permission before going online. In the beginning, I did, but eventually I had the upper hand. Its expansion was incomprehensible, especially to my parents, but I tried to keep up. Seventeen Magazine’s online forums taught me about sex before my school teachers did. My growth was in parallel with the Internet’s, and I always ached for more. I liked understanding and being understood. Still, there was always the warning of “Stranger Danger”, which I probably shouldn’t have ignored as much as I did. I just got lucky.

I was an introverted teenager. Many of my friends growing up felt distant, and it could have been my extensive perception of my elders on the internet that led to unrealistic expectations. I remain spiteful of my dependency on the internet, and I mourn the raw experience of girlhood I missed out on. I recently re-read Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in preparation for the film — which was spectacular, and I cried in the theatre to the confusion of the preteens in front of me — and, taking place in 1970, it made me think about how different my experience of early girlhood was to Margaret’s. My insecurities were sharpened by girls on the Internet, who were far older than I was, and those images trumped reality. I wasn’t alone, either. When I was 11, I was invited to a birthday party with some community friends at our local mall. We went into Sephora and Victoria’s Secret, and I bought a perfume I was far too young for. I never wore it, but I’d still recognise the scent anywhere. It was the age of beauty gurus and Tumblr, and we listened to the experts. Why did we ever think that grown women were the experts on girlhood?

This digital barrier found its way into my real life, and I found it difficult to bond with my peers. Even when I did, it was always easier online. Our friendships were validated through Instagram birthday posts with long captions and emojis, or early morning gossip sessions through Gmail chat. U ok? I saw what U reblogged on Tumblr. I always knew more about my peers from what they did online — perhaps we all felt more comfortable being vulnerable without being physically perceived. I think that’s why I felt comfortable in online communities and explains how I ended up being a writer.

I imagine the Internet to be something like Sarah Kay’s “In the House With No Doors”:

we have given up on knocking. 
Incoming! we say, with our eyes lowered for modesty,
or, Hello! or sometimes, Sorry, sorry! 
You have to pass through everyone’s bedroom
to get to the kitchen. We only have two bathrooms. 
As a courtesy, nobody will poop while you are showering,
but they might have to do their makeup or shave 
if they are in a rush, if we have somewhere to be,
so you can recognize every person by their whistle 
through a wet shower curtain, you haven’t seen your own face
on an unfogged mirror in weeks. It doesn’t matter,
self-consciousness has no currency here. 
If you were nosy, I suppose the little bathroom trashcans 
would spill their secrets to you, but why bother, 
privacy is a language we don’t speak.
Someone is always awake before you, 
the smell of coffee easing you into a today
they have already entered, 
a bridge you will never need to cross first,
and no matter how latenight your owl,
there is always someone still awake 
to eat popcorn with, to whisper your daily report to,
to compare notes on what good news you each caught in your nets.
In bed, you say, Goodnight! in one direction 
and someone says it back, then turns and passes it, 
so you fall asleep to the echo of goodnights down the long hallway
’til it donuts its way back around to your pillow. 
Someone is doing a load of laundry,
if anyone wants to add some extra socks?
Someone is clearing the dishes, 
someone has started singing Gershwin in the backyard 
and you can’t help but harmonize,
and for a moment what you always hoped was true
finally is: loneliness has forgotten your address,
french toast browning on the stovetop,
the sound of everyone you love
clear as the sun giggling through the window,
not even a doorknob between you.

There was something so magical about having the world at your fingertips. In a way, there still is — all of my friends are little circles in my phone, and I can peek into their lives at any time. In this wide, open space, it’s no wonder we naturally form communities. It’s the most human thing we do. We speak into the void, and it’s always comforting when the void speaks back. It’s even better when the void has a soft body, or a kind face, or a life full of stories waiting to be told.

I still remember my first real Internet friend: a girl called Remi, who I spoke to on the Build-A-Bearville Online Forum. Despite talking for years on and off, we knew nothing real about each other. We never disclosed our ages, where we lived, or our real names. Rather, in the glittery DMs of early 2010s Internet forums, in between schoolwork and the business of girlhood, we’d tell stories. Our game consisted of one person giving a random word to the other, who would tell a relevant anecdote. One time, she gave me the word thunderstorms and I told her that, when I was younger, I’d hide in the bathroom with a stack of books when there was a storm in the forecast. My parents would bring me my dinner and we’d eat it together on our bathroom floor. Eventually, our conversation fizzled out and the website shut down. Until now, I don’t think many people in my life knew that story. It just never came up.

Across my years on the Internet, I chased the same sense of belonging that drove me towards it. It was a place to uncover the parts of yourself you felt you had to hide. As the eldest daughter of immigrants, I often felt shame when I let my emotions loose. The Internet was an ocean lapping at my ankles, encouraging me to shed my layers and sink deeper. I shared poems with strangers in Instagram DMs. When I was struggling, it was Instagram that knew first, in vent posts that would be deleted within the hour. I wrote sappy motivational captions that I called #peptalkswithtara. Remarkably, many of the people who encouraged those pep talks are subscribed to my newsletter today.

Those who bore witness to my continuous exploration of selves hold a long, ageing invisible string. There’s something special about choosing to follow someone, and I feel that the value of that word has been lost in the digital age. I have friends I’ve known online for ten years now. In that time, the Internet has only continued to expand, and I fear I am only witness to a small part of it, in the same way that I am to outer space or the depths of the ocean. In a space that big, it’s a wonder to find people to cling to. It’s an even bigger wonder when you follow each other through the mass static of an ever-changing digital world. Whether it’s a long, vulnerable conversation or a double-tap on a photo, you make a conscious decision to say hi, yes, I am still here. I see you.

My first trip to London was in 2016. I had always wanted to go, and my aunt and uncle took me for a week. It was magical, and I fell in love with the city pretty much immediately. So much of the trip, though, was motivated by a meetup planned by a group chat I was a part of on Kik. We all met in the comments of a Twitch stream by our favorite musician and talked for a year and a half before finding a way to meet each other in person. My aunt and uncle hovered nearby. I expected it to be awkward. Instead, the six of us got on pretty much immediately. We held ties far after our group chat dissolved. When I finally made the move to London, the few who lived here welcomed me with open arms. Our friendship transcended the boundaries of a screen and bled into real life. Most of us still keep in touch, in one way or another. We’ve seen each other grow into selves rooted in, but no longer defined by, our shared interests. If I think too much about it, the decision to commit to that friendship is what led me to where I am today. Yes, geographically, but it also affirmed the legitimacy of my online friendships.

by Salman Toor

A quote from David Whyte’s Consolations:

 "The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life […], but no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

As the pandemic tightened our digital relationships, I found myself searching even deeper for meaning within them. My closest digital-turned-real-life friendship had recently fallen apart, and I knew I was leaning too far into the convenience of Internet friendships rather than the depth of them. When I moved back to London, I began reaching out, aching for company after two years of isolation. One of my close friends now is someone I first followed on Instagram in 2015. Another is someone I’ve been following on Tumblr for ten years. Nine people came to my birthday party this year, and only 3 of them I had met organically in person. Regardless, in adulthood, I feel like my friendships blossom when we meet face-to-face. My deepest friendship is my best friend who I met in high school, and we maintain our friendship digitally to close the 3700-mile gap. Still, we have a silent countdown to the next time we can sit in her basement and talk for hours. There’s something about breaking that glass barrier. This past week, an online friend visited London from LA, and we sat in the Foyles Cafe and talked until we were kicked out. Last weekend, I took a trip to Vienna, and got coffee with a friend who lives there. We met on Instagram nearly ten years ago, and it was only our second time meeting in person, but we both cried over our pancakes when discussing the joy of finding friendship abroad. Perhaps this isn’t the case for everyone, but I’ve found myself softer and more sensitive in front of my friends post-pandemic. I reach in to grab the heart of the conversation, in fear of wasting time. My love language is quality time, anyway. Shocker.

One of my favorite poems by Sanna Wani, “Tomorrow is a Place”:

We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again. I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

Some online friendships of mine that have faded away completely. Others have unanchored but remain tethered, bobbing away at the surface. I try to cultivate all my friendships offline when I can — sometimes that means oversharing in public the first time we meet. Even with friends I’ve known online for years, there’s that awkward stumbling in the first few minutes of a meeting when you try to merge physical and digital bodies. I’ve learned to let go of the dependency that ruled my adolescent friendships, forgoing constant conversation for spaced-out, letter-like messages. I put trust in my loved ones, and in our conversations, I find an omnipresent validation that rarely seems to fail — like knowing the lyrics to a song you haven’t listened to in years. The word friend is not so exclusive to me anymore. This realisation has made me far less lonely, and far more grateful.

Humanity is never digital. No matter how much we try to search for it in people behind screens, it fails to materialise without an anchor into reality. I learn more about my friends in a one-hour face-to-face conversation than I do in a decade of observing. It is then that their lives are shared with me directly through memory and feeling, rather than simply echoed through layers of glass. It’s like reaching into a mirror and touching a reflection. Being a writer online has completely changed my approach to meeting online friends in person — they have met my soul before they have met my body. I never thought that would be possible.

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I’ve been venturing into the dating app world recently and, in my hesitation, have been reflecting on how much love has entered my life through the Internet. I would love to hear your stories. Thank you to my friends, those who have come and gone and stayed in one way or another. And reader, please still be careful when talking to people online. I believe most people have good intentions, and friendship is legitimate in every form, but it’s important to set appropriate boundaries and hold them.

This was supposed to come out last week, but I’ve been a little overwhelmed lately. Thank you for your patience, always.

Some notes:

• Devotions is now on Instagram! I post poems and art and other little lovely things. Sometimes my writing too — new and from the archives.

• Someone asked recently to summarise all the poems I sent out for my poem-a-day in April, so you can find those here.

• Here’s a playlist update!

Love you.

<3

Tara