My sister is kind of famous. Well, Internet famous. I’ve decided recently that being Internet famous doesn’t count as being real famous. Some people would disagree with me, but that’s my opinion and I’m keeping it.
I have to. Hopefully you’ll understand why.
I have two sisters. The tea-bearing, awesome Jane, and the nerdy, academic middle sister who wears a lot of plaid, Lizzie. I’m the youngest. Obviously when my parents had me, they realized they’d achieved perfection.
So my sister is kind of Internet famous. Lizzie, not Jane. Though Jane kind of is, too. And so am I, but in a different way now, I think.
Lizzie and her best friend, Charlotte, started a video blog for a grad school project last year. She’s not any good at stuff like makeup or video games or being funny, like you’re supposed to be when you have a video blog (okay, that sounds so stupid, I have to start calling them vlogs), so she just decided to dress up like people we know and talk about her life.
The vlogs were actually pretty cool. And me and Jane and Mary and other people we knew got to be in them, too. Lend our awesomeness to Lizzie’s somewhat-less-awesomeness.
A lot of people watched her videos.
And followed her on Twitter.
And followed her on Facebook.
And then they started following all my stuff, and Jane’s, and Mary’s, and everyone else’s. Even my cat, Kitty, had a Twitter following.
And then . . . I started my own videos.
It’s this thing you sort of get caught up in. You don’t really think too much about sharing your life with strangers online, because you aren’t thinking about them as strangers online. It starts with just a few people, and then a few more, and a few more, and before you know it, it’s this giant network of fans telling you how awesome and cute you are and how invested they’ve gotten in your life, and defending you when you get into fights with your sister or when people are being mean to you. They’re like friends. And non-Internet-famous people have online friends, so it’s totally legit.
Except when there are so many, they aren’t your friends. They don’t actually know you, and you don’t know them. They’re just strangers, watching like you’re in some sort of glass cage. Only, you’re the one who put yourself there, and you don’t think about trying to get out because you don’t even notice the walls surrounding you. In reality, you’re just existing, raw and exposed, on display for everybody’s amusement. To dance when they scream for you to dance.
So you dance. And you flip and you twirl and you get caught up in the music—
And then you trip.
And all the applause and laughter goes dead silent. And before you know it, the silence has morphed into heckling, a taunting audience that doesn’t resemble the one you thought you knew, shrieking about how much you deserve whatever karmic retribution you’re about to get. It throws you. And as you keep tripping, as you keep screwing up, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve always been dancing on two left feet. If their amusement has always been at your expense and the only difference now is that for whatever reason, nobody’s amused anymore.
You’re not amused, either. Not by them, not by yourself. Not by much of anything. All you can do is try to stop tripping. Try to stand still.
But they’ve already seen so much of you. Too much. Everyone has. And anyone who wants to for the rest of existence will be able to because, like Harriet said, that’s how the Internet works.
Everything gets remembered. Forever.
And people . . . they aren’t afraid of using stuff against you. Of taking your lowest, most regrettable moments and saying that’s all you are.
All you ever can or will be.
Ms. W says it’s to make them feel better about their own failures. But I think it’s because we’ve made it easy to think of people online as not people. If they aren’t, we can never be them. We can’t make the same mistakes, fall into the same ugly traps. I guess what me and Ms. W think aren’t that different. It’s all about distance. Us versus Them. Me versus You.
Everyone at my school versus Lydia Bennet and George Wickham.
Who’s George Wickham? Yeah. He’s . . . well, that’s a good question.
I can tell you what I know.
• George Wickham was this guy my sister Lizzie dated for like six seconds.
• He was super hot and had great abs and was really nice. Seemed really nice.
• Lizzie and I got into a huge fight. We went our separate ways for a while.
• My way accidentally crossed with George’s way.
• We started dating.
• We didn’t tell Lizzie.
• He said he loved me.
• I think I loved him.
• We made a tape. The kind you don’t want to get out.
• Except he did. Want it to get out. And tried to sell it on the Internet for money, using my pseudo Internet fame. And my videos. And my face. Pictures of us.
• Lizzie’s new boyfriend and George’s childhood-friend-turned-nemesis, William Darcy, cleaned it all up and nobody’s seen or heard from George since.
• I don’t know why he did it. George, I mean. I don’t know.
Oh, and all of this? Happened on camera.
So, there you have it. There’s my very own personal tale of the consequences of televising my private life across social media. I’d have given you a PowerPoint presentation to go along with it but you can just Google me to get the gist. Even watch it happen—all my videos are still online.
I thought about taking them down. Lizzie wanted me to, even offered to take some of hers down—and she believes in the public record. She said she didn’t want me to ever go back and relive any of that. But I haven’t. Taking anything down—videos, tweets, all of it—wouldn’t change what happened. What it meant.
But the point is: everybody knows about it. Everybody at school. Everybody in the whole town. All of it, right up until the moment the site that would have sold the video to anyone with PayPal was shut down.
Everybody knows.
Anyway, that’s why I missed some classes last semester. That’s why I’m in counseling. That’s why Central Bay College took pity on me and is allowing such an extremely late application for fall enrollment (well, that and Ms. W put in a good word for me. And it didn’t hurt that Darcy is a long-time benefactor of the school and made a few calls “suggesting” they allow me to apply). That’s why I haven’t been out partying with my friends, and why I’m not convinced I even have any friends left here to party with.
And that’s why I’m not entirely thrilled to head home right now. I love my family, but they’ve been so overbearing since all this happened. Not in a bad way. They just want to make sure I’m okay.
All the time.
Sometimes I want to ask them how I can be okay if they keep treating me like I’m about to break.
But I guess sometimes I wonder if I am.