William White (aka Whiteyy18) and the Women He Awakened

I have been online half my life. I turned to the internet and away from real life in 1994. William White, aka @whiteyy18 on TikTok would not be born until a year after I launched my own website around 2000. I’d already lived a whole life by then, a life that had turned out badly for me. I’d dropped out of graduate film school to chase a man who was recently dumped by his wife — what I didn’t know then was that, as Meg Ryan says in When Harry Met Sally, “he’s never gonna leave her.” My friends, they very rarely do. Lesson number one.

Feeling like a very dumb female and a hollow shell, I found my way online. I was an early immigrant to what would become ordinary life in our country, and our world. Life online. We live through our imagined avatars. We can be anything we want … online. It was easier to navigate everything … online. It was easy to be beautiful … online. It was easy to be confident … online. I was a shy person so business meetings were hard for me, but if there was a barrier of internet wire between us I could handle them. Email was easy. Selfies always make you look good. Nothing about it is real.

I figured out pretty quickly that the internet was made for people like me, who aren’t really made for the real world. I have tried to stay up to date on the latest internet platforms. I got on Facebook and Twitter…