My entire childhood was adjacent to a 24/7 news cycle of scrutinizing women’s bodies. Our school cafeterias were stocked with low-calorie snacks and diet sodas. It wasn’t just my family, either: My friends’ mothers signed them up for Weight Watchers. When my mother was sober, she wanted me to go to Curves with her because she was afraid I would follow my father to obesity. Cheese, I was denied entry because “they didn’t let older teenagers in alone.” I cried alone in the parking lot until a stranger helped me inside. At my best friend’s tenth birthday, held at Chuck E. The doctors blamed KFC for my first period at nine, for my body hair, my acne, my unusual height. I was often mistaken for being older than I was. When I wasn’t online, I spent my time begging puberty to reverse itself. Having uncensored access to the internet felt like proof of my maturity. I uploaded grainy pictures to Photobucket and linked them to questions where I begged for validation: Rank Me and My Friends from Prettiest to Ugliest (Guess who I am!)? I followed rabbit holes all the way down to Pokémon forums where I lied about being a high schooler named Lexi, or until I wound up on gaming sites filled with soft-core porn ads. I was often unsupervised in the family computer room, mostly clicking around YouTube or Yahoo! Answers. It was hard to grasp the breadth of the internet at fourteen. My cousin, a year older and much cooler than me, had heard about it from her even older, even cooler neighbor. At that time, in 2011, the platform still felt like an invite-only club. I signed up for Tumblr in the spring of eighth grade.
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