𝚒 𝚞𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚋𝚎 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 | 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚔 𝚢𝚘𝚞, 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 ♡

11 Jun, 2026

Needed a place to talk like we used to. I guess Angelfire is gone. I'm too old for this internet and somehow still a beginner here... Substack gives me imposter syndrome and I always feel the need to explain...

I don't mind the ring lights and the 5G and the ultra crazy super hi-fi definition of everything... I just don't need the super reality. I get enough of that... everywhere.

I miss the internet as a haven. The place where I curated my interior. The place where I came with my real truth... but never from a beige palace... never with all the tapping. I miss not needing to be an expert. I miss our blurry photos not because I didn't love "Real", but because I already had a REAL WORLD to deal with and this was where it was my movie... this is where we could show how it would look if we could make it that way...

I miss talking about something without proclamation.

I am a little afraid that the only people in these corners are a part of some -osphere or another that I'm not invited to. Or welcome in. I'll be honest. I didn't even do my due diligence. I found a free blog site and crossed my fingers. I typed a title and jumped in. Old school.

I hope this isn't another wrong space, or worse, a space that hates me. I'm a creep. I'm a weirdo.

I want to process whatever is happening without a 30-day plan or hacks. I want to create and commune. I want to make music with other people who make music. I want to meet people in real life again and find them at concerts and around dumb camp fires like we did in '03. I wish it could be new again. I wish we'd get it right. I wish we'd keep the capitalism out and each other in. I wish we were still giving each other somewhere digital to be when the analog heart couldn't find anywhere out here to belong.

I lost that internet. And I miss it.

I'm 42 now. In some rooms, I'm ancient. In some, I'm still just a poseur manic pixie nightmare who didn't figure it out. I lost most of my metrics for how to do this wild and precious life thing.

I turned to the internet and I know it's happening. Running away in RVs and soft anarchism and Instagram homesteads... but I forget what's trust-funded and what's photoshopped and designed to sell me one more answer I can't afford. Anyone certain is selling something certainly or something. Ha.

I'm not a writer. I'm not handy with code. I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me.

But somewhere between all the em dashes and optimization plans and politicized everything, I see meaning-making. I see ethics I respect. I see community. I see humans. It's just strange how little of it is anywhere I was told I could expect it. Certainly I thought our histories had been more fact-checked. I thought the people in charge were mostly good. I thought someone had the whole world in his hands.

I grew up in the Midwest with no small amount of religious confusion, so it was natural that I was unsure WHO had the whole world, but I was definitely being assured constantly by the grown-ups in the room that someone had this whole thing under control. Don't worry. I'm not still there.

I've got grown children now. That means I have experienced the singular pleasure of knowing my teenage child can articulate my generational trauma (and appear to understand it clinically) and plethora of diagnoses better at 16 than I could at 35 on hour seven-hundred-something of therapy... the language was there. Don't mind me. I'm just learning. We all are. Some of us quickly. Some of us with a fair degree of deprogramming to do. I'm one of those.

I don't have many days without some shadow of someone's disapproval or my own shame or some neurodivergent urge to only feed wolf number 16 because that's the motherfucker that gets things done (a little IFS humor for my babies in the back)...

I don't belong here. I don't know if I belong anywhere.

But I need to write in a way that isn't... allowed? Gosh... I am not here with any horrifying ideologies or anything. It's just... it hasn't always been a clean story. I've lived what's amounted to a staggeringly ordinary human life, so it's always stung a little when some part of me that was just true got marked restricted or called something it wasn't. Compressing my "self" into something easy to scan and incomplete.

I feel too big for the internet. Not like a megalomaniac. Like a pair of not-stretchy jeans from before my hips changed... like with this new shape... I'll never get back in... but here's to trying.

Is there anybody out there?