I was sitting in my room, bored out of my mind. I rolled over on my bed, and found the perfect time-waster. A computer I was given for Christmas. So I opened it up, went on a random website with people on it (it ended up being twitter), and made an account. That's when I realized something. For people to notice you, you had to be a very specific kind of person, even if it was wrong.

Eventually, I ended up making friends, which was good, despite not being me. It was great, amazing even. People had loved me, craved me to do more, it was like a form of euphoria to me. I needed it, I craved it, I wanted more. But eventually, it all fell down. I lost motivation to run that original account, and could never catch the same sort of high that I had.

Back when I had first started, I ran an account on a community known as “Parody Twitter”, in which people would do a pseudo-roleplay kind of thing, where you would edit images together to convey a story. I was doing one based on a character from Nintendo, known as Paper Mario. The original character, however, had no personality at all. So, I decided to write to him in a different way than others did. I portrayed him as a lunatic, who had no thoughts in his head other than insane rambling. And it ended up doing… surprisingly well, actually! People loved it, and after a while I ended up being invited to events and tournaments. But after a while, it didn't end up feeling like a thing I was doing for fun. I was treating it like a job at that point, only caring about what others thought, and not my own health.

Eventually, I was able to stop my addiction to the account, even if I did try and do it more. I began drawing for people, along with doing voicework for others and modifying video games. It was fun, though I wasn't doing much of anything over the time. I had contemplated trying it again, but due to my parents banning me from social media, I was unable to attempt to make any more accounts.

Of course though, there's always bad apple’s in communities, and this one was no exception. 2 years after I had left, somebody had joined a public chatroom for people who had used to do Parody. This person, going by an alias of Circle, was a very hateful person, despising people in the LGBT community, going as far as to threaten their lives.
After Circle and their affiliates were banned from the chatroom, and anywhere else they were able to get access to, severing lots of believed friendships in the process, I used the opportunity to reflect on myself. During this self-reflection, I had realized that I was not a very nice person to others. I had known prior that my personality was never like this, though, so I had begun to refer to this other personality as their own person, dubbed “Alice”, after old miscommunications of my name.

Eventually, though, I had realized this was not the way I should have handled how rude I was, to throw the blame on this fictional person that can't hold responsibilities, and blame them for everything, since this person was still a portion of me in a way. I’ve gone on to accept this fact, and now Alice is nothing more than a muse, and a part of me of which I've learned to accept. Now Alice is my way of determining who to keep around, and I am completely fine with that.

© Alex. All rights reserved. If you are interested in quoting this story, contact the national team and we can put you in touch with the author’s teacher.