/dep/ - Depression

I first started using the Internet during the early 2000s. I was 12 years old or so, and used it as an outlet to escape and forget about the difficulties I faced in life and school. Been that I was so young, I never told anyone what my real age was, nor did I ever share any important details about my personal life. Naturally, I also never VC'd with anyone, or sent a picture. This mindset has stayed with me to this day, and I still can't think of the Internet as anything but a virtual, parallel world. This is why I'm always baffled by how eager some people are to share personal information online, as though this sharp divide that exists in my mind between "reality" and "Internet" doesn't exist for them.

Whenever I interact with anyone online, I'm never interested in who they are behind the screen. I don't even want to hear their voice, because even VC is too "real" for me: it goes against my notion of what the Internet is.

I had a very shitty life, filled with trauma and mental torment, and the idea of isekai-ing (if I may use that word) into a separate world helps me cope. After all, this was the reason I became addicted to the Internet as a 12 year old in the first place. Yet the line between irl and online only got blurrier as time progressed, which is very alienating to me. Due to a similar reason, I never use my phone for browsing or anything other than phone calls for the most part, because a phone is unlike a PC in that it's more tied to the irl self. I know this is all a delusion, and the Internet is nothing more than an extension of real life, but I wonder if anyone feels the same as I do.