Like a lot of millennials who grew up in the first chapter of the Internet era, I spent a lot of time - certainly too much time - online, in chat rooms and on sites like LiveJournal, where I documented my life in exhaustive detail.
I had emotionally fraught relationships with boys who were still in the closet, smoked a lot of clove cigarettes, and wrote maudlin poetry with titles like “Your Bulimic Girlfriend” and “Semi-Meaningless Physical Manifestation of Loneliness” and, during a brief and ill-fated period of experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, “I Am Writing This on Acid.” I was too loosely supervised by my well-intentioned but distracted parents, who gave me too much freedom after I came out unusually early, at age 11 I think they confused being overly permissive with allowing me to be myself, or maybe they just didn’t know how to control me. I shouldn’t have been so worried, since I was already crazier than most of my friends - bright but narcissistic, sexually precocious, and emotionally high-strung. When I was a teenager, nothing frightened me more than being ordinary.
