As a Little Girl My Best Friend Was a 35 Year Old Man
My parents didn’t know he even existed.
In 2001, the internet was a lawless frontier ripe with opportunities to make friends with complete strangers.
The required “A/S/L?” — age, sex, location — at the beginning of every online interaction was an ice breaker, not a barrier to entry.
For an 11 year old introvert like me, the internet was a godsend. I was relentlessly bullied in elementary school and hoped middle school could be different.
I had my own private desktop in my bedroom and computer illiterate parents: a dangerous combination. They had no idea I spent my free time talking to children and adults online. Neopets.com, Side 7 Art Gallery, and AOL chatrooms were virtual watering holes where I made my first real friends.
It didn’t take long for me to find a community of fans obsessed over a new TV show airing that same year. Our communion filled me with more warmth than all of the Sundays my parents dragged me out of bed to church.
This is how I met George. George was the director of my favorite TV show.
We met in an AOL chatroom. It was the private kind only the most elite members of the fandom were invited to. People who actually worked on my favorite show were present too. I felt divinely selected!
Unfortunately, the conversation went above my head. These users weren’t spending their evenings doing pre-Algebra homework like me. These teens and early 20-somethings were cultured.
They made jokes about sex. This scared me the most. I lived in Tennessee at the time, where I recently finished an “Abstinence by Choice” curriculum that forced me to pledge my virginity to my yet-existent future spouse. How could everyone in the chat be so flippant about a sacred adult union?
But I needed these people to like me. I played along the best I could. They thought I was funny. Thinking back, it had to be obvious I was a little kid. I didn’t have a job to complain about or a college paper to procrastinate writing for.
That evening I dipped my toes into the pool of adulthood for the first time and the water was just fine. I made George laugh the most.
Later that night, George reached out to me privately over AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). He immediately asked my age. I usually lied to my online friends and told them I was the wise age of 16.
For some reason I felt compelled to tell George the truth. Maybe I didn’t want to lie to the man that helped make my favorite TV show a reality. I hemmed and hawed for half an hour before revealing I was — gasp! — 11 years old. He found it amusing. He told me he was 35 years old. Like it wasn’t a big deal at all.
Shortly after our first conversation, George and I began talking every day.
I had a routine. I’d ride the school bus home and get to my computer by 4:15pm every day. I’d go on AIM and stare at my friend’s list until I saw George come online. Some days I waited on him for hours, which was pure agony. As the weeks passed and we talked more, he started coming online consistently around the same time I’d get home from school.
I told him about my dumb teachers and my mean classmates. George told me about the large house he owned in Los Angeles, which might as well have been on Mars from my perspective. He’d worked in the art and entertainment world since he was 20.
Effortlessly, George blossomed into a vibrant, god-like figure in my mind. I loved making art and he was my telescopic view into the real world of a working artist.
One time I devised a prank to pull on him. We were close friends, after all.
I allowed a friend from school to log into my AOL account and talk to him while pretending to be me. An hour later I logged back in to review the damage and reveal the deception.
He was furious with me. I think he called me immature. I was shocked, then ashamed. That’s when I knew, without knowing the words for it, that I was in love with him.
Three days later when he felt like talking to me again, I begged for forgiveness.
George enjoyed showing me sexually explicit comics he’d draw while at work.
They were funny, but definitely the sort of stuff I’d get in trouble for looking at if my parents ever saw them.
Even though his drawings made me uncomfortable, I still loved looking at them. He was an excellent draftsman, so they were beautifully rendered. I also felt special because he was (hopefully) only sharing them with me.
George once drew a picture of what he thought I must’ve looked like. It was cute, but I had to disappoint him.
Gathering my courage I sent him a picture of myself for the first time. I was not the nubile creature he’d envisioned. He commented on my thick thighs. Other than that, it was obvious he was unimpressed with the way I looked.
At that age I couldn’t articulate how much his reaction disappointed me.
He also home-brewed his own beer, a feat he wore as a badge of honor. When he first mentioned it I asked, “At what point in the process do you pour the alcohol into the beer?” He found my question hilarious and I didn’t live it down for a long time.
On several occasions he also talked to me while drunk.
His barely coherent messages were hard to read. Those were strange nights for me. He thought it was hilarious and I humored him, even though I didn’t understand why being drunk was supposed to be so funny. Obviously I didn’t know anything about alcohol.
One morning in 2002, I awoke to my mom screaming.
I thought I was still asleep and having a nightmare. The sound of a lamp shattering against the living room wall drove me to sit up in bed.
In the next room over my parents argued about my dad’s secret girlfriend and relapsed heroin usage. Thirty minutes later he packed his things and drove straight out of Tennessee. I didn’t hear from him again until six months later. My parents quickly got divorced after all of the drama died down.
Before all of this happened I didn’t even know my dad was an addict. I discovered he’d been clean for six years. A new record for him.
My adolescent world crumbled around me. On the outside I responded to the divorce so calmly my mom often called me a saint.
On the inside I was dying and losing grasp of some ineffable quality of childhood. Like my mom, my dad wasn’t very interested in my daily personal life. But he’d encouraged me to make art. We liked the same TV shows. He enjoyed talking to me. Sometimes we would play games together.
But my dad had been magicked away. The events of that day in 2002 removed any trace of his existence from my home. He might as well have died.
After my parents’ divorce, George became more important than ever in my life.
I finally showed him some of my art. He was ecstatic to critique my work. It was like he’d been waiting for the opportunity to arrive. He drew corrections on top of my scanned drawings with red marker, which he then sent back to me through email.
Every time he pointed out my mistakes my heart broke a little. I mostly drew for the fun of it.
But I was a fatherless girl now, hungry for elderly male approval.
The popularity surrounding my favorite show died over the next few years.
George stopped working in Hollywood as a TV director. Still, we talked every day. We were best friends.
Eventually he stopped drinking. He lost a lot of weight and bought a whole new wardrobe. He sent me dozens of pictures of himself. I was proud of him. Secretly, I basked in the imaginary power I possessed: giving him approval.
When I turned 14 he asked me if I wanted a marvelous birthday gift: a DVD boxset of my favorite Japanese animated show. It was a collector’s edition worth at least $200.
I wanted to say no so badly, but he knew how happy I’d be to get it. What astonished me was how he acted as if $200 was pocket change for him. At the time my mom was working two jobs to pay $700 in rent!
I succumbed and gave him my address. For a week I ran home from the bus stop to check the mailbox for my gift before my mom could. The day it arrived she beat me to the punch.
Frustrated, she demanded to know who the hell sent me a bunch of DVDs. I lied and said it was from a girl I met online.
My mom bought the story. She even joked about getting this internet stranger to directly wire us money.
I believed I dodged a bullet because she was too ignorant to understand what an online relationship even was. Now that I’m older, it’s clear my lie only worked because the DVDs proved no immediate threat to my safety or the sanctity of our home life. Otherwise, she didn’t care about my personal relationships.
George was ecstatic to hear I received his gift.
Next, he planned to send me a $500 artist table so I could finally “learn how to draw like a professional.”
I was equally floored and upset by the offer. He sent me pictures of the table. It was carved out of beautiful oak and shipped from a legitimate art supplier from the Pacific Northwest. Becoming a “real” artist was my dream and George could make it a reality.
I refused. I had to. My mom was negligent, but not blind. She would ask questions about a giant package delivered to our home. Besides, that desk couldn’t fit in my small bedroom if I tried. George was annoyed, but eventually stopped pestering me about it.
I often think about how different my life would’ve been had I taken up his offer.
When I turned 15, George got married to a 19 year old woman he met in the Philippines. They knew each other a total of three months.
She was only four years older than me. He was 21 years older than her.
This was the first time the age difference between me and him lost its unique allure in my mind. For years I believed my youth and his elderliness made us special. Hadn’t he chosen me to be his best friend because no one else was as intelligent and captivating as I was for my age?
Teenage narcissism was a bitch.
She wasn’t fluent in English and he knew at best 50 words in Filipino, none which could save a marriage. They got divorced less than eight months later.
He never mentioned her except a few times when she was mean toward his dog. I didn’t ask for many details. At first I was insanely jealous a stranger had taken him away from me.
But the longer I thought about George while he was married, the more I found our relationship to be unsettling rather than unique.
Around this time I also found out a mutual online friend of ours had requested George take her virginity. She was turning 18 years old.
I don’t know if he followed through on the request. I was too taken aback to dig further into it. I didn’t know he talked to so many young girls.
From the age of 15 to 18, our daily chats dwindled down to once a week. George still critiqued my artwork, but it was clear he lost faith in my ability to excel as an artist.
People I’d met online years ago who could only draw scribbles were now in possession of expensive software and years of drawing practice that made their art look professional.
In comparison, my work was mediocre.
To compensate for my failing artistry, I spent my high school career obsessively focused on my grades.
I lacked the emotional capacity to care about anything else. I was a straight-A student. I took so many advanced classes I had to stay up most nights to finish all of my homework. I started drinking coffee since it was the only thing that could sustain my lifestyle. Thank God I didn’t have a car to drive. I would’ve died from falling asleep at the wheel.
Why didn’t my mom tell me it was okay to slow down? I remember the mornings she came into the kitchen to find me wrapping up my chemistry homework. Instead of expressing concern for my health, she got angry for a few minutes then left me to my devices again.
High school allowed me to perfect the art of isolation. I had real life friends, but I rarely saw them outside of school. I was awful at keeping any sort of commitments to them, which I regret to this day. I spent every weekend doing more homework or chatting with strangers online.
George wasn’t interested in discussing my woes about filling out college applications. They paled in comparison to the childish rants we shared when I was 11 years old. When AIM was finally in its death throes, we moved our conversations over to Livejournal and Facebook. By then we were only chatting once in a blue moon.
In 2008 I was accepted into a prestigious school on the east coast. I still made art. I also began taking medication for depression for the first time.
During my first semester George messaged me in excitement — he was visiting my college town, and we should definitely get dinner. Late at night.
Was sex on the table? I really had no idea. I was curious about what it’d be like to sleep with him. I wasn’t a virgin anymore by college, but I was far from experienced.
In my mind the prospect morphed into an exciting perversion. But I was too nervous to go through with it.
I wasn’t as adventurous as the new friends I made as a freshman. I declined George’s invitation and told him I was too busy with finals to see him.
He never brought up meeting in real life again.
The last time I spoke to George was in 2012. It was brief, but devastating.
I told him I was accepted into a graduate school program to study art full time. Aren’t you finally proud of me, George? I remember thinking.
Excited, I showed him one of the portfolio pieces part of my submission packet.
He gave me a long, scalding critique of how pedestrian my work looked. The worst part was that it was obvious he didn’t care enough about me anymore to show disappointment. Obviously his years of trying to teach me how to be a great artist had failed. Resigned, he told me I’d never make it creating art in the real world and that any institution that accepted me couldn’t have been reputable.
Thinking back, George was partially right. My work was no where near as polished as it could have been after 10 years of making art. There were 15 year olds on Tumblr who could draw circles around me. But somehow the new school I was going to saw my potential.
Still. I was blown away by the bluntness of his words. I failed to impress him. The future all at once became a hostile place where dreams went to die.
By the time I was 25 years old, my recollection of George changed drastically.
Somehow, I reframed my friendship with him as a strange, funny thing that just happened to me.
Who wouldn’t think it was hilarious a little girl and a grown man who directed a popular TV show were once best friends?
One day I randomly told my boyfriend at the time about George. His look of confusion surprised me. He asked me if I was okay. If I ever went to therapy to process the relationship.
I laughed it off. “You’re right,” I said, “I guess it was kind of messed up he talked to a little kid about all that stuff!”
As an adult I made a game out of recontexualizing the story of my childhood so it made sense. George was just a quirky passerby during a lonely (but weird!) period of my life. I had been anti-social and lonely as a kid. It was my fault I allowed him to take up so much space in my mind. Right?
When I sit still and tap deep into my memories, all of the emotions I felt for George as a child float to the surface and stun me with their intensity. Fear. Shame. Guilt. Romantic love.
That blunted kind of adoration you can only experience in adolescence really is powerful.
I looked him up on Facebook again recently. He unfriended me. His only public posts are a few racist memes about Treyvon Martin’s death. He’s a Trump supporter now. He has a new, youthful wife who’s a fantastic artist.
In 2018 I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
That year I also had my first anxiety attack while at work. Even though I finally had a coveted position in the art world, I was falling apart. I was unequipped with the tools to put myself back together again.
The people around me navigated through life as if they’d all read the same book for healthy adulthood. I didn’t even know there was a book.
In July of 2018 I cut myself for the first time. I told two friends about it. Their comforting words made no difference to me.
To the outside observer, I was thriving. I was in a long-term relationship and I was financially stable. I had no excuses to give for why I felt so miserable all of the time.
By October of 2018, I lost my job. I had nothing to prepare me for the level of failure and shame that obliterated the self-esteem I did have left. Worst of all, not even the therapists I shelled money out to understood why feelings of worthlessness sat within me like a bottomless well.
In 2019 I finally discovered the name of my affliction. Childhood Emotional Neglect.
I read a blogpost one day about Myers Briggs Personality tests. One of the commenters mentioned how the personality type I tested for may have some connection to being neglected as a child.
My initial reaction was that it was just another unproven claim by a fake internet expert. Curious and wanting to prove myself right, I looked more into the topic.
I found information about cPTSD, a complex form of PTSD usually caused by being neglected as a child. Jonice Webb, Ph. D, a psychologist who specializes in CEN (Childhood Emotional Neglect) offers clarity on the phenomenon in an illuminating blog post. First, she defines it:
Childhood Emotional Neglect is both simple in its definition and powerful in its effects. It happens when your parents fail to respond enough to your emotional needs while they’re raising you.
Emotional Neglect is an invisible, unmemorable childhood experience. Yet unbeknownst to you, it can hang over you like a cloud, coloring your entire adult life.
Reading these few sentences shook me to my core.
The indescribable agony I felt on a daily basis finally had a context that the general descriptions for depression could never provide. She goes into more detail in the article:
What makes Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) invisible and unmemorable? Several important factors. First, it can happen in otherwise loving, caring families that lack for nothing materially. Second, your parents’ failure to respond is not something that happens to you as a child. Instead, it’s something that fails to happen for you as a child. Our eyes don’t see the things that fail to happen. And so our brains can’t record them.
All through my childhood my parents lived their lives as if I were a side character in their hero’s journey. George offered me a fantasy version of engaged parenting.
Webb describes some of the symptoms of CEN:
Guilt, shame, anger, and blame; The Fabulous Four, all directed at yourself. Some people have a tendency to go straight to guilt and shame whenever a negative event happens in their lives. Do you feel ashamed of things that most people would never be ashamed of? Like having needs, making mistakes, or having feelings?
Decades later, an adult, you sense that something is not right, but you don’t know what it is. You may look at your childhood for answers, but you cannot see the invisible. So you are left to assume that something is innately wrong with you.
I spent months devouring more articles and videos about cPTSD and CEN. After 29 years I finally figured it all out.
There was nothing ever wrong with me. All of my perceived failures to everyone in my life and the collapse of my dreams weren’t a reflection of my innate worth.
Now, I could finally heal.
Recently I began a meditative practice specific to cPTSD that has mitigated the effects of my depression. It’s like I’m seeing the world for the first time.
I’ve realized George’s presense in my life was indicative of a larger issue: the fact my parents neglected my emotional needs.
Despite everything, I’m finally at peace with my life. I’m learning how to forge genuine friendships. I’m practicing accountability and making changes in my life. And not because I feel a need to cow to an authority, real or imagined.
I’m grateful my childhood relationship didn’t turn toward a darker road many children find themselves careening down. I was never abused physically, nor do I believe I was ever in imminent danger. I’ll never know if George was aware of the gaping chasm my parents left in my life that allowed him to enter so easily.
Regardless, what he thinks and feels about me doesn’t matter anymore.
It took me 30 years to finally know I don’t have to be a world famous anything to love myself.
What a relief!
(Author’s Note: To maintain the anonymity of people featured in this work, there are instances where descriptions of events as well as the names of individuals and places have been altered.)
