I'm going to give you a glimpse into my mind for a minute.
Imagine that you are an ADHD addled 12 year old boy with almost no real social outlet. You aren't popular in school. You escape into your own mind to find company. You read textbook-length novels for fun, to escape from reality. You wish you had friends. You see kids eating with each other at school lunch, talking with each other, yelling and playing and communicating, and you wish you had that. You just recently got a Nintendo DSi for your birthday. It's large, red, and it's got an internet browser on it.
So you search up some sites where you could talk to like-minded people even though your phone is ancient and you have no laptop or tablet or any other way of going online. You find a site called dsipaint.com. You go into the first chatroom, and you find friends.
This was me, in 2012.
Imagine that you are right in the middle of puberty, beginning to look at boys and girls a different way, beginning to look at school a different way. Your parents have recently put you on a medicine to treat your ADHD; it works, and you focus easier, but your personality has shifted and you're now quick-tempered, angry, and depressed. Imagine that you meet a girl and immediately are enchanted by her, her black hair, her kind smile - but you don't understand the scars on her arms, or the pain in her eyes. She teaches you how to cut yourself. She says she does it when she's sad. Well, you're sad all the time.
Meanwhile you're writing a blog series on 3dspaint.com, about the internet - typing it all on a shitty 3DS touch screen. You write 25 parts to it, and you receive glowing reviews. One commenter says he loves it as much as the Harry Potter series. You show your parents proudly, and exchange hugs. They are so proud of you - not so proud of the cuts on your arm. But your friends on 3dspaint.com don't mind them.
This was me, in 2013.
Imagine that you have moved away from the black-haired girl and your friends at middle school, and you later find out that she committed suicide in a bathtub. You are heartbroken by this change, and you can't seem to make any friends at school, yet again. You take solace in 3dspaint.com yet again, lurking in chat rooms, writing blogs. Later, you remember the arguments over the superiority between BanMan and Waffle King. You remember the wannabe hacker who messed with the site's HTML code to look cool. You remember your Canadian friend, tough and strong, all those random numbers in her username. You remember the times when The Mystical Journey seemed like a true game, soon to come out, rather than an abandoned relic.
This site has become your social life. You are on it for hours every day, always hoping to make new friends. Its bright colors and the hum of your 3DS distract you from reality. You may be scared and sad, but these people like you.
This was me, from 2014 to 2015.
Imagine that your beloved site is dying. You're frustrated, because the changes needed to revive it seem so simple and easy to implement; but you never hear of any changes. People are growing up, and leaving. YOU are growing up, and leaving. One day the site is distant from you, far away, like a desert. Everything is Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. Instagram. Reddit. These sites are so big, so scary. So you shut down.
Imagine that too many things to name in this blog happen. You develop a crush on a boy, and then you move away again. You get into Super Smash Bros. so you have a hobby. Your love for writing slowly dies out as you see less and less point in the matter. You download a chat client called Discord in the hopes of finding friends. You find a server, edgy and full of vitriol, and your jaded angst becomes a facade in which you seem like them. You develop another life, here. You rise the ranks of the server and become co-owner. 3dspaint.com is all but a distant memory. You meet new and interesting people every day.
Imagine that you've met a girl who you eventually fall in love with. Imagine that, over the course of a year, she manipulates you deeper into her mental trap. She pulls your strings and you dance like a puppet, all for her. She takes your feelings, shreds them, and hands them back to you to put back together. All of her insecurities, depression, anxiety - they are now all yours, and your weight to carry alone. Imagine that this girl makes you feel like the smallest man alive, and yet you cannot help but love her.
And imagine that it crashes and burns, in the most beautiful and ridiculous way possible. You feel as if you will never be whole again, and, in the coming months you make your own Discord server and you try to cope with the pain. You hate her. You hate your past. You remember your past. You remember 3dspaint.com.
So I went back to the site and logged in, and I don't think the feeling I had is possible to put into words. I am 19 years old now. Seven years ago I was a child with a Nintendo handheld, and a drastically different person. I've had so many experiences, so many losses and gains, so many friends made and friends lost. I am a different person seven times over.
But you are the same. 3dspaint.com. The low-quality site wallpaper. The chatrooms. The blog formats. The Mystical Journey. The red names of the big guys in charge. The polls, the groups. All that's different is that you are dead, and the people I remember are gone. To me they are dead - their afterimages are in my head, soon to be forgotten. My friends have grown up. I have grown up. But you have not. You're still the same.
Despite everything, it's still you.