online girlie: unplugged vol. I
I used to dream of this moment.
When I shared the news that I’d have my own column soon with a beloved friend and writer, she called it a rite of passage. I’ve had an excessive amount of dreams for myself in the 24 years that I’ve been alive, and I’ve been lucky enough to see many of them come true already. Growing up in towns where you can count the population on just a few hands often turns people into anticipated archetypes: on one hand, you have the ones who never leave, with their anchoring pride in where they’ve planted their feet. On the other, you have those who never lose the gut feeling that they’re on the brink of something bigger.
I fell in love with words when I was kid: I would fill up entire journals as fast as I could with songs, confessions and complaints, stories and screenplays about my life when I was as young as 10 or 11 years old. I would write down quotes from my favorite books because I wanted to remember how they made me feel — from one word that stuck out to me to a full page from a chapter that choked me up. When my guardians at the group home I grew up in began to read my journals, I started creating anonymous accounts online, hoping to immortalize the places I went inside my head. I found myself on different corners of the internet going by different names. Claiming that kind of agency at my age had been strictly forbidden, but I was a crafty combination of courageous and sneaky. I craved connection and an outlet to share my life with people whom I could relate to; and for the first time in my life, I felt like someone out there could relate to me, too.
I lost track of my love for writing as I got older, especially when I started modeling full time in my early 20s (see above: I’m still in my early twenties!) In the early days after moving to New York City from my tiny town in Florida, my attention span was purely devoted to making the dreams that had always been past an arm’s length into my new reality. If you told me on my $34 one-way flight to Brooklyn that I’d land where I find myself now, I don’t know if I would have believed you. Or maybe I would have, and that’s why I’m here in the first place.
It was that same year that, through a simple social media bio, I started telling myself and the world that you can be anyone when you’re a girl online. It’s how I got scouted by agencies that flew me across the pond, it’s how I discovered many of my idols and found some of my friends, and now it’s an arena in my pocket of people who, at one time or another, gave a fuck about what I have to say. As one of the greats once said: I’m having a ball in this bitch!
When I started transitioning out of the modeling industry a few years later, it was because I knew that I wanted even more from my life. I knew that I wanted something to bring to the table that came from the heart and meant more to my own wellbeing. Modeling never really gave that to me. The instant gratification that only came every few months (an oxymoron, I know) was draining and drowned out by the repeated blows to my physical and mental health.
I felt aimless for a while. I was broke as hell, but I was having a lot of fun and telling myself that time with my friends was therapeutic, distracting myself from the fear of feeling lost again. No one hands you a guidebook when you step into the real world alone. I’m lucky that the people in my life saw that I was thrashing around in the deep end and decided to wade down and walk out with me.
There’s a lot of pressure to remain diligent and ambitious in a place like New York City. I was settling into my social life very comfortably, although at times the cost outweighed the reward, and my professional life felt lacking. I finally had found community, but my ambitions idled as I measured up comfort against what I knew I was capable of. The thing about silver linings is that they don’t always come to you; sometimes you have to march toward them. Once I opened myself up to the life I wanted and the person that I actually wanted to be, everything changed. I crawled out of the hole I had fallen into when I left the fashion industry, I applied to a job on a whim that changed my life in a matter of months, and I started sharing my writing in longform again for the first time since I was in highschool.
I spent most of the past year sinking myself into my new job, recovering from a series of gender affirming surgeries and dreaming up this column. It all felt like a recommitment to myself, now paying off in ways that I’m only starting to see unfold. As it turns out, I just needed to pop a ‘mone and a whopping dose of tough love. It feels good to have hope for another year, it feels good to be proud of this one. I’m writing this to you to give you some hope, too. Maybe that’s what it’s all about.
Many of you know me as @onlinegirlie, and I’m not logging off anytime soon. I’ve spent the past few years getting to know you, letting you get to know me, and the overwhelming response has reignited my love for spilling my heart out (even if it’s from behind a screen). The times you have stopped me in the club, or caught my attention in a heartfelt DM, to tell me that documenting my life publicly has allowed you to see yourself in someone the way I yearn to see myself in others, too, has inspired me. Your words have given me hope; I’ve learned a lot from my life, and continue to learn more about the world from those who’ve helped me grow and those of you that have grown alongside me.
For the next evolution of onlinegirlie, I’m opening up the forum here at office; in each installment of this column, I’ll be responding to your submissions with anecdotes and the best advice that I can muster as we figure out life together. After all, you can be anyone when you’re a girl online. Might as well be the girl with a lot to say.
TALK TO YOU SOON! Love you =)
