I loved you, you know.
Maybe it was infatuation. I’d heard a lot about you in grad school. You’d just come on the scene, and friends of mine were friends with you. I was curious, so I looked you up. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of the reason I stuck around — at first — was because Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day were into you, and sometimes hanging out with you felt like hanging out with them. You were young, then. Gangly. A bit of a mess. And that was okay because I was, too, more or less.
But we grew up, you and I, and we stuck together. And soon it was hard to peel apart the layers of friends who were truly mine and friends I only had because of you. We had a whole community — authors, librarians, teachers, readers, bloggers — but you were the glue that held us together. You made sure we all stayed in touch. And it was beautiful, you know, waking up to a post from someone I’d never met in real life that was so totally true to my life that it made me laugh until I choked on my coffee.
It was so very beautiful, and that’s probably why I ignored the ugly. Not ignored. I called you out on your racism and your queerphobia and your ableism and your sexism and your everything. I said it was gross, and our mutual friends said it was gross, and sometimes you apologized. Sometimes you cut out a bad influence or two. And I pretended that was enough. I wanted it to be enough because I was afraid that without you, my whole community would collapse. I didn’t know how to be me — professional me, grown-up me, connected and sociable me — without you.
I was wrong.
Not about our community collapsing; in many ways I was right about that. But I was wrong to stay with you for so long, to ever think you were, or could be, enough when you were never willing to dig deep enough to truly change. I could blame these friends you’re with now, and I do. They’ve made you worse. But I have to acknowledge that you were never good. Even among our community of mutual friends, you were never good enough. There’s a reason I never felt safe sharing my pride flag with you. And by staying with you, I was tacitly accepting all the ways you were hurting people, not just me.
I’m trying to do better in the new little corners of the Internet I’m carving out for myself, hold the platforms to account, not get so swept away by the romance that I start to love them for how they make me feel rather than who they are. It’s easy not to get swept away. They’re all too much — too visually stimulating, too bright, too many hashtags, not enough filters. They don’t make me feel the way you did.
I do miss you, in spite of it all. Not enough to get back together — not now, after everything — but I do miss you. You’re wearing all black these days. I heard you’ve even changed your name. Are you doing fine without me? Or hiding the hurt? It doesn’t matter, I suppose. But I like to think you miss me, that my absence takes a cut out of your heart — or at least your ad revenue. I like to think that every night when your gaggle of hateful trolls is spewing their vitriol, you remember what we had and why we lost it. And I hope that someday you decide to make yourself into the type of social media platform you always had the potential to be.
Not for me, though. I’ve moved on, and the most important thing I’ve learned is that as much as I miss you, I definitely don’t need you. We’ve found each other again, the friends I had through you. Now, without you, we meet in new spaces, not all the same places, not always as comfortable for my tetchy brain, but friendlier. Safer. We’re continuing to talk, to post, to connect, figuring out our stumbling way forward in the dark.
Because I’ve finally realized you weren’t the glue that held us together. You were the glue that stuck our doors and windows tight, keeping us suffocating in your toxic fumes. Keeping us from realizing we didn’t need you.
We were always enough on our own.