I was a Teenage Catfish

So. I'm old.

In 1995 my family got AOL (America Online). I was 14. Now for those that didn't use AOL it was a weird early social media. You had email, and access to the internet, but it wasn't a web browser. They did their best to keep you inside the AOL hub, you could access the world wide web, but if you searched in AOL for news, it would give you AOL news hub. Another thing AOL was famous for was the chat rooms. Basically you entered a hub, and could chat with random people all over the world. You could choose chatrooms that were centered around your interests. My mother hung out in Civil War chatrooms (more on that at a later date) while I discovered FFRPG (Free Form Role Playing Games.) Basically DND without dice and all text based. The Red Dragon Inn (it had multipe rooms in case you didn't want to be in a popular one) was the one I remembered the most. The funny thing was I was not "trained" as a roleplayer, I was pretty terrible at it. It wasn't until years later that I became rather notorious as a roleplayer and often sought after. And this is why...

Right about the time AOL became very popular news stories started to appear about predators preying on teens or kids by pretendinag to be kids their age and wanting to meet up (I've got a wild side story with this... remind me to post about it.) This was the age of:

And yes this was a thing. The 10 o'clock news would start with: It's 10 PM, Do you know where your children are?

So my mother, a crazy scary formidable woman, literally instilled the fear into me that I was going to get kidnapped by someone on the internet. It didn't stop me from roleplaying in chatrooms or randomly chatting with people. So I created and online persona, which I guess helped with the roleplaying. I started as a 14 year old girl playing a 24 year old guy playing some fictional character. Whenever someone asked my ASL (a/s/l) or Age Sex Location, I would use the nearest big city, 10 years older than the opposite sex.

Now fast forward two years, it's 1997, I'm 16, and takings some college classes over the summer. A guy approached me in math and asked if he could borrow my notes, he had missed a day. I said sure, let me make a copy for him. A friendship struck up, and I learned that between classes he would go to the computer room (think of a room with long tables and computers elbow to elbow, where they were free to use) and do FFRPG. I hadn't roleplayed in awhile because to be honest AOL was trying to keep people in the AOL hub while other providers were letting people willy nilly on the internet. He explained he had an internet girlfriend (she lived in Texas, we're in MO) and that he didn't want her to be jealous of me. I said no worries, I whipped out the old Sam Collins persona (the name I had given to my alter ego.) I was 26 now, a dude, and friends with the classmate. He introduced me and my world immediately opened up.

Up until early 2010's, I roleplayed as a girl, pretending to be a dude, pretending to be a fictional character. My writing improved, my imagination had no limits, I was able to develop plot lines and characters on the fly. What posts became a few sentences became paragraphs. I was in high demand as a roleplayer and often had a waiting list of those who wanted to get into my games.

But lets get back to the classmate and the RP (roleplay). After a couple of weeks he came to me and said he needed me to tell his girlfriend I was actually a girl, a teen of 16. The reason was he said his girlfriend was going to dump him to attempt to get with me. So I did as he asked, I confessed I was a teen girl of 16 and at that moment I was suddenly gutter trash. I was unable to RP with anyone in that community.

I found another community to RP with and was back to the girl, playing a guy, playing a fictional character. Except this time I was claiming I was married, had a kid, so as to be "unavailable" to the women I roleplayed with. However once again some of the ladies I played with "fell in love" and again I had to come clean that I was really a chick, this time I was in my late 20's.

Now I'm in my 40s and am not afraid of people knowing I'm a woman online.