I was homeschooled in Bali from the age of 4 - 5 and that was when I really learnt the fundamentals of reading and writing. When I started school at 5 I hated it. But I liked reading and I liked writing, we were made to learn joined up handwriting (which I think you call cursive) and I didn't like that because I was a perfectionist and I wanted it to be perfect. I also didn't understand full stops (which I think you call periods). They seemed like such an important part of the sentence and I couldn't understand how something so important could be so small.
The first time I remember using a computer was when I was around 6 years old. It was my mum's big green desktop Mac and me and her found a website where you could design your own Barbie and actually have it made. We spent hours designing our dream Barbie, she was wearing dungarees and had pigtails and we were very excited. When we were finished we printed out the 'barbie' and waited eagerly by the big black and white printer in my mum's study. I think we both thought that our dungaree-ed Barbie was going to walk right out of the printer. She didn't, we were sad, but my relationship with online shopping had begun.
When I was in year 4 (5th grade) I wrote my first proper short story. It was a horror story about a man in an ice cream van who drowned in a pit of melted ice cream. I remember feeling very proud of it and my teacher picking my story and my best friend Flora's stories as being the best in the class. I also remember we had to draw a picture of a door and make a flap and write the story down under the flap. It was an interesting way of thinking about text and I remember loving the mixture of text and design, I still love working with these two things in combination today.
When I was in year 6 (7th grade) my whole class had to take a test to find out if we were allowed to stop using pencil and move on to pen. We practiced for the test for days and when you finally passed our teacher gave you a 'pen license'; a laminated piece of paper declaring you were legally allowed to use a pen in class. When I arrived at my high school a year later on my first day I approached my teacher and eagerly presented my pen license. She looked at me with a look I will never forget, it was an extremely clever school and I the shock that came over her at the idea that one of her students would actually think you needed a license to use a pen was close to the shock of discovering your dead father has returned as a ghost and is dancing around the kitchen in a dress. Needless to say I never used my pen license again.
New media really became a big part of my life from the age of 10 to 12. When I was 10 I got my first laptop (white, macbook, very grown up), and when I was 11 I got my first mobile phone (pink, nokia, slide up, very silly). I was obsessed with my laptop and when I moved to Bali for 6 months at the age of 10 I discovered Bebo for the first time. For anyone who doesn't know Bebo was the far less cool version of myspace. Each user had a profile featuring many things we are used to with modern social media sights; albums of pictures, a short bio, a 'wall' where friends could post posts. But Bebo also had a lot of extremely tacky features, friends could send 'love' to one another and the total amount of 'love' you'd been sent would appear on your homepage for everyone to see (I never had as much love as my best friend and this was an ongoing pain in my life). Each user would also have a 'flash' - an annoying youtube video of your choice that would start playing as soon as anyone came on your page (the boy I fancied had a Radiohead song as his 'flash' and I pretty much thought that was the coolest thing ever. You could also put a 'skin' on your page which made it a different colour or style or covered with pictures of the Jonas Brothers. And while Bebo was for showing off and writing messages featuring lots of 'LOVE YOU BABES' to my friends, MSN (interestingly, MSN stands for Microsoft Network and is the name for the entire network however it became the common term used to describe Microsoft Messenger which was a downloadable instant messaging program) was where all the real social networking happened. When I started school I would return home and immediately run upstairs to 'do my homework' which translated as sit at my desk with a math book out while having obsessive group conversations with my friends and even with some 'boys' from the 'boys school'. My first proper boyfriend was on MSN. It was a passionate relationship lasting exactly 32 minutes. He asked me out on MSN, I said yes, 32 minutes later I told him, via MSN, that it was over. It's amazing to think that so much of my early teenage life took place online, through my fingers, touch typing, texting, translating words from my over excited 12 year old brain into computer programs I don't even think of anymore yet alone use, and yet at one point in my life they were more important to me than food and water.
As I got older and more 'grown up' Bebo was replaced by Facebook and MSN was replaced by texting. The thing I remember most about early Facebook was the importance of photos and the importance of wall posts. Me and my friends would meet up with the sole purpose of the date being to take Facebook pictures and the agony of picking a new Facebook profile picture would keep me up at night. I would also spend hours composing long messages to post on my friends Facebook walls. The strange things about these posts was the mixture of public and private. They were disguised as being private but the entire aim was so that other people would read your conversations and think you were 'cool' or 'funny'. I remember thinking I was good at Facebook posts. That I was good at Facebook. It's a strange idea. The art of curating your life into something it's not. But it's something we all do more and more every day. Later on in my life once I left school Facebook became very painful to me. I would spend hours on it obsessing over my friends lives, thinking they were all so happy while I was so unhappy. It's something I still do on Facebook and Instagram and it's so easy to forget that it's all fake, that everyone is sitting at home in their ugly pajamas eating ice cream and scrolling through Facebook.
I started Tweeting 5 years ago and it's amazing to think what a huge part of life Twitter has become since then. Whereas it would be impossible to imagine a teenager who didn't use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are still seen as being optional to teenagers and can be looked down on as being annoying or naff. When I left school I was pretty lonely, and I turned to Twitter to find a community that I couldn't find in people my age. I started tweeting about things I was doing and feeling, cakes I was baking and mostly things I was knitting. People started to respond and I soon found a whole group of people who I could talk to through my phone and my computer. To this day a huge majority of my followers are older women, often stuck at home because of a sick child or not having a career. A lot of them have turned to craft or baking as a way to try and inject some positivity into their lives and I know that that was exactly why I took up these hobbies. When things are really tough the idea that you could knit something or bake something and it might make people happy even for 5 minutes is huge. I started talking to these women and their encouragement was what made me start my blog (more on that later) and eventually start the Twit-Knit Club (more on that later too). I know people hate Twitter and say it's full of horrible people but I've had an overwhelmingly positive experience with it over the years, I've found beautiful people with beautiful things to say and have created real friendships with lots of them, meeting many of them in real life. More recently I talk to a lot of people who also suffer from mental illness on Twitter and the honesty you can get online that you would never find in real life is staggering and really magical. I do get the occasional 'hater' but the idea that the myth of 'trolls' would keep anyone away from this amazing community makes me sad. I started Instagram more recently and I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. Similar to the way I feel about Facebook I think people can use Instagram to romanticise their lives and only show the good bits. But it's also made me much better and taking photos and the dreaded 'selfie' has actually made me more confident about pictures of myself and about my appearance. I try to keep my Instagram as a mixture of 'Instagrammy' things but also things like my bleeding knee and my bed bugs bites. It's important to remind people that it's not really real. And that you're pretty unhappy most of the time even if you're Instagram doesn't show it.
In 2011 when I was 15 I started my first blog. I wasn't in school and I was very unhappy and I'd started reading a lot of blogs. My favourite's were craft blogs, knitting blogs and anything about home or baking or basically anything I could do from the confines of my bedroom. Starting my blog changed my life. My first blog was a real escape from everything I was going through. I would never talk about personal stuff. I would just post what I was making, watching, baking and doing. As it grew in popularity I started to realise that while I liked craft and baking and all the things I talked about on my blog, what I really LOVED was blogging, and writing, and I was pretty good at it. Over hours and hours of struggling, googling and trying and failing I became pretty good at designing my blog, I used blogger for Teen Granny and managed to teach myself a bit of coding and web design, and I found I was quite good at it. But what I was really good at was writing. And I loved it, and other people seemed to like it too. I used to get 200-500 hits per day and I loved what I was doing. I could feel myself getting better and for years my blog was the best part of life. I felt like I finally had something that was mine, that I was proud of, and I was developing a love of writing and a real love of the internet.
My blog led me to a lot of amazing things but perhaps the most magical was the friends I made through it and relationships I formed that all started online. About 5 months into my blog I had so many friends on Twitter who were also at home, watching Grey's Anatomy and knitting that I decided it was time to make a real community. I started something called the Twit Knit Club and I ran it through my Twitter page and my blog. Every month we would have a knew project theme, ranging from quilts to food, and we would all have to knit something along the lines of that theme. We would tweet each other encouragement and with news of our progress and each week I would do an update on my blog where I would post all the pictures of everyones works in progress. It took off and before long I had about 50 regular members, mostly elder women, and we all became very close. They're actually still all extremely close friends and I've met most of them but they've slightly kicked me out of the group (it's a long story). Anyway after about a year of the twit knit club I decided to take it to a new level. I started something called Knit Relief which was an online auction raising money for aid programs in Africa and the UK. I encouraged people to knit, sew or crochet things and then put them all up on an ebay auction. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated. I got hundreds of entries and at the time had no idea how to work ebay. I had to teach myself and it actually took over a year for PayPal to un-freeze my account after I received too many donations and lied about my age (another long story). We made over £2000 and it was amazing to see how I could use the internet to do something so huge involving so many people. There was insane amounts of admin and I spent hours linking everyone up with the people who'd bought their items, uploading pictures onto ebay, writing description boxes and advertising the auction on Twitter. It was a huge experience and really showed me the power of the internet. I believe in the internet and I love it. I've made some of my best friends online and a huge part of the development of my writing has been through tweeting, emailing and communicating with people online. It has also helped me a lot as I often find it hard to make real life friends and being able to write well online gave me trust in myself, my intelligence and my social skills at a time when I was becoming cripplingly insecure.
As my blog started to get more attention I began to be approached with opportunities to write for other mediums. I knew that writing was what I loved and what I wanted to do with my life but it's been an interesting journey dealing with what happens when my writing becomes someone else's property. The first semi professional thing I ever did was being a weekly columnist for Hello Giggles, an online magazine. Writing for Hello Giggles was one of the most positive experiences of my life. It's an amazing website, nothing I wrote was ever edited and everyone I met through it was welcoming, kind and lovely. Once I started writing for newspapers however, things got a lot more complicated. My parents are quite well known in the UK and I found that most newspapers only wanted me to write for them because of my parents. One newspaper (The Daily Mail) read my blog about mental illness and threatened to do a 'tell all' piece about my life unless I wrote something for them and another would only ever ask me to write for them if it was something concerning my parents (The Telegraph). It's always complicated for me whether or not to accept these opportunities. On the one hand I know they wouldn't be asking me if it weren't for my parents. But on the other hand I know I'm a good writer. And I know that the more I write, the more I can prove myself, the farther away from my parents I will get and people will start seeing me as a real journalist. For example, while the article I wrote for the Daily Mail was written under pretty horrible circumstances, I was really proud of what I wrote, and the feedback I got from it was amazing and has led to a lot of other writing opportunities, not because of my parents, but because people actually liked what I wrote. Just recently I've been starting to be able to do things on my own as a journalist. I wrote an article about politics for a UK magazine and I do quite a lot of other journalism for newspapers and magazines all around the UK. I'm so proud of this and I really feel I'm developing as a writer. However it hasn't stopped me from having some bad experiences. Recently I wrote an article for the Telegraph about the movie adaptation of Into the Woods. I felt I did a pretty good job but when I started getting angry tweets I was confused. When I read the article I found they'd changed 90% of what I'd written. They'd completely subverted my points and made it the worst written article you've ever read in your life. I got a lot of hate for it and the comments are pretty funny to read. I ended up sending the original article to a particularly angry tweeter who published it on his blog but I left it at that. I felt to engage properly would only be making it worse and while I know everything online stays there forever I like to think that in the end none of it's THAT important.
My journey with writing and the internet has been a long and complicated one, but I'm pretty happy with where I am now. I stopped writing Teen Granny about 2 years ago because I started to suffer with very bad anxiety and depression and I just couldn't face writing a blog where I was pretending to be bright and sunny all the time. But I missed writing, and designing and communicating and in the end I decided it was to start blogging again. I wanted to make things different this time though so I decided to make a blog that still included a lot of my passions (knitting, craft, baking, movies) but also some more personal things and reflections on the issues I face everyday with mental illness. It was a big risk, and I know a lot of people say you shouldn't share these kind of issues online, but I'm really sick of feeling ashamed and I felt if I was sharing so much of myself online that I wanted to share the parts of myself that maybe aren't so nice and shiny as well. I decided to use Wordpress for my blog this time and I found my years of experimenting with web design really payed off. It was a lot easier to make my blog look proffessional on Wordpress and I much prefer it to Blogger. I also decided to buy my own domain name and once I got enough views I started to use Wordads so I can make a small amount of money through my blog as well. The response to my blog has been overwhelming. The amount of tweets and comments I get from other people suffering with the same issues as me is staggering and beautiful and a really incredible experience. I feel my blogging has grown up and I also feel I'm maturing as a writer. I love writing more than ever and as I grow up I feel I'm finding a voice and discovering the things I want to write about. My blogs been more sucessful than I ever imagined it would be and I'm really hoping I can continue to write it while I'm at NYU. A lot of people have negative experiences online, and while I'm no stranger to some of the darker sides of the internet I also think that if you really throw yourself in and try to find the right kind of people, the internet can be a truly amazing place.
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