My Big Sister, The Internet

Surfing the web as a teenage girl in the 2000s

As a teenager, I didn’t hit the typical milestones as quickly as my other friends. No first kiss until I was 16. Never had a boyfriend or even had one ask me to dance until I was 15 (thank you Quinton, I will never forget you).

Ever the slow-developer, my baby teeth were still rattling around my head at 13 when my dentist dad had to eventually pull them out.

At that point, the rite of passage for many girls in my class was to go to an under-18s club night called ‘Hotsteppers’ at the Aberdeen Beach Ballroom. Being part of an all-girls school, it was also very crucially the place to meet boys. I had no boy friends or acquaintances beyond the boys in the drama group I went to every Tuesday night. And they weren’t especially alluring or cool. I saw one of them in a McDonald’s once and instead of saying hi he snuck up behind me and put a pickle slice on my head.

So every Monday at school we’d come into form room and sit on our desks and hear the tales of from Friday night’s Hotsteppers. Who went? Who snogged who? Who wore what?

Hotsteppers seemed to me like the kind of location where boys would not put pickles on your head. Hotsteppers was where the magic would happen! Where you could wear your jeans and a nice top and lipgloss and dance with a boy and maybe kiss one and finally, be a teenager.

The girls that went to Hotsteppers were classified as the ‘popular’ girls in our class. Because our year was so small (under 30 people), the popular girls were very accessible and, in general, quite nice really. We’re still all friends to this day. But these girls knew how to do things. They knew how to use straighteners to curl their hair. They shopped at Internaçionale and Tammy and knew how to apply eyeliner. They had boyfriends or at the very least had kissed boys and brought in their copies of Sugar magazine for everyone to look through.

Tammy. Where preteen fashion dreams came true.

It was a secret dream to ascend to the leagues of Hotsteppers Attendee and become a regular Tammy shopper. But growing up in this way felt like I needed to get a permission slip. And I had trouble just summing up the courage to ask my Mum if I could buy a copy of Mizz magazine from our local newsagents.

Is it a core 13 year-old experience to feel stuck between two worlds? Your brain starts to expand and yearns to figure out what it means to express yourself, but you still don’t have an idea of what that ‘self’ is. You’re stuck between being a child and wanting to be older. Your Mum still buys clothes for you, you still don’t have total authority to plan your weekends, and you’re attached to your little sister who you will wholeheartedly admit is your best friend but part of you secretly wishes you also had a best friend your age who you could swap CDs and go shopping with. And even though you want to be dancing at Hotsteppers on a Friday night… you are still content to play Barbies at home instead, as long as people don’t know that you’re still playing Barbies.

One morning I came into school humming ‘Pinball Wizard,’ to which one of the popular girls said, ‘oh my god I didn’t know you were into McFly!’ And I had to explain that no, I was not a fan of McFly (you were either a Busted or McFly person and I had to stay loyal to my political leanings and also my friends and I had decided that Charlie Busted was hotter than Danny McFly. Also I was just offended that she didn’t know it was a The Who song).

As much as I wanted to learn how to straighten my hair and spend Friday nights at the Beach Ballroom, I wasn’t really, deep down, interested in hanging out with the Hotsteppers girls. Sure, maybe I’d feel cooler and older, and perhaps learn the choreography to Xtina’s Dirrty, but I knew that I yearned for something that felt more ‘me’.

Whatever that was.

💻 Enter: The Internet.

The best time for the internet was Saturday mornings at Dad’s house. 7am, the magical hour where everyone is still asleep apart from me. Insanely, I would literally wake up at 7am — 7AM, FOR A TEENAGER — so I could log on to the computer, in the computer room which had very much become My Personal Domain. I’d open up Internet Explorer, maybe my journal .txt document, iTunes, and would spend the morning hours on the internet in my pyjamas, with a bowl of cereal filled almost to the brim.

Yep. Those were the good ol’ days.

I would scroll through the posts of my favourite pixel art forum and fall down website rabbit holes, discovering a magical world where I felt like it was possible to be the sparkling, creative, glitter-smeared vision of myself that I always felt I was inside.

As an eldest child, the internet was a hidden treasure trove of big sisters to the girl who was the big sister: girls who made cool art, girls who posted emo music, girls who blogged about thrift shopping and girls who knew how to code websites.

None of my schoolfriends delved into forums and blogs as much as I did, but being online gave me more social currency. I’d find bands or funny videos online (I remember introducing my irl friends to Fall Out Boy and Neil Cicerega) and people would ask, “where did you find this?” On the internet, I’d say, like a magician with her secrets.

My favourite site was a pixel art forum, called Eden Enchanted.

Eden Enchanted was one of the bigger ‘dolling’ forums on the internet, during the brief period when ‘dolling’ was a thing. Dolling was a form of pixel art, but was more like playing dress-up: a lot of artists made ‘bases,’ which were basically blank Barbie dolls. You could save these bald pixel people to your computer and then design and draw on their outfits and hair¹. Some people were insanely talented at this.

Clockwise from top: So-Called Pixel, Yumestudio (Angy-Chan), Room4Squares, Dollkat, Daeva’s Dolleria, all archived by The Doll Archive

The forum seemed like 90% women and a big portion of us were teenage girls, excited to log on and make art on the internet. Everyone shared their artwork, and in the discussion threads we’d introduce each other to bands, discuss internet ‘netiquette’, talk about fashion and TV shows like Charmed and Buffy. I was a lurker and rarely posted, but I still absorbed it all like osmosis. There were people out there showing me a world that I wanted to be a part of.

A few years later I’d be prepping for my first school dance. I really, really wanted to put my hair in a beehive. I googled ‘How To Do A Beehive Hairstyle’ and stumbled across a blog which would literally change my brain chemistry (remember when hair tutorials were blog posts???). It was called iCiNG, run by a twenty-something Kiwi girl who accessorized like her life depended on it and changed hair colours with the seasons. Her name was

Gala Darling

and her blog joined my roster of Big Internet Sisters.

Gala’s site circa… 2007? 2008?

Gala would write (and still writes!! find her on Substack) about things like fashion, beauty, self-confidence, and writing online.

Back in the 2000’s and early 2010’s, she was the queen of whimsical listicles:

As a fifteen-year-old reading this list of what can only be described as a manic-pixie-dream-girl’s manic-pixie-dream-life, I saw my future:

I would wear pink and glitter every day, I would send letters and zines to friends and code my own website, I would cut up magazines and make moodboards and dye my hair and wear pearls and celebrate my birthday in increasingly ridiculous ways and take delight in every single moment of my life. I would live in a high-rise apartment in a big city and have breakfast for dinner and write poetry on the back of napkins in lavender glitter ink.

But the closest I could get at that point was sweeping my hair up in a beehive for the school dance, and buying my first tube of liquid eyeliner. It wasn’t much, but the cat’s eye flick I painstakingly drew on the corners of my lids felt like the first step towards the grownup I wanted to be.

🏰 The Ghost of You

Soon, the internet as I knew it would disappear. Sites would change or fold. Eden Enchanted would shut down its servers. Livejournal posts I’d written would get lost with an inactive account, my Bebo and MySpace profiles would wither away and die, my original hotmail address would sit unused and lock me out eventually, and the angsty txt documents I’d write would be lost to a hard drive of a laptop now defunct.

So much has been lost that it sometimes feels like a dream. I do really wish that more of the things I wrote and saved were still floating around somewhere.

I think about the person I was in my teens and early twenties. Did I lose her too? She was still a bit shy, still a bit unsure of what she was doing and who she wanted to be. But I wonder if I’ve grown up to be the kind of girl she would have admired. Am I the manic-pixie-dream-girl of her internet teen dreams?

I don’t know. I don’t know if we can ever grow up to be the Wonderfully Impossibly Cool and Perfect Person we imagine when we’re teenagers.

I hope that, if there were some kind of short-circuit in the internet, and 13-year-old Olivia would find 33-year-old Olivia’s websites or music, that she’d be added to the Big Sister roster.

Here are some things which I’ve done lately which my teenage self would be proud of:

• I live in a big city (this was a non-negotiable for me!)

• Had pancakes for dinner (we need to not forget that we can still do this as adults)

• Kissed a boy (1 cool point!) who is my boyfriend (wow I have a boyfriend! 2 cool points!)

• Hung out with my friend who I met on the internet (hi James)

• Texted my AMERICAN friend who I also met ON THE INTERNET (hi Maggie)

• Made necklaces for myself from glass beads and silver charms

• Handwrote a letter to a friend

• Released a single off my debut album (that is multiple cool points)

I’ve also started to learn html and css and code my own website.

It’s a passion project which is unattached to my music and is currently acting as an online diary. And no, you can’t have the URL, because half of the reason I’m doing it is about just making something online and keeping it to myself.

This small corner of the internet feels like the good ol’ days.

All I need now is a very big bowl of cereal.

📝Join Me in The Comments!

Hopefully today’s post has been a bit of a breather from the US Election news. Let’s talk about our teenage selves and the internet!

1. What was the Hotsteppers equivalent for you when you were a teen? Did you ever go?

2. What were your favourite websites to scroll back in the 2000s?

3. Tell me 3 things you’ve done recently which would make your teen think, “wow, they are… so cool.”

Want more? Check out some ways you can support me & my music:

• buying my music on Bandcamp

• forwarding this newsletter to a friend!

• and if you haven’t already, subscribe:

Be good,

Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶

1. All of my dolls are gone now, having been saved to a laptop which is definitely now defunct. The only one I can find is a couple from a Deviantart account which I never updated. Here they are, although I didn’t make the bases, I just added the clothes & hair.