Electric Rain

Wattpad: A Look Back

Hello... It's been a while

When I downloaded this app, I was 12. Now I'm 20. I was most active between age 12 to age 16. This app has been present through over 1/3 of my life and was an important part of 1/5 of my life.

I started on here as a naive middle schooler with a username based on an imaginary American Girl doll. I was never good at picking usernames because I was always caught up in what my friends would think was cool or not. It, without fail, ended with misspelled usernames.

I started out writing a play by play rip off of a YouTube series that I was obsessed with at the time. Along with that, I wrote the start of a rip off to the movie Castle in the Sky with too much unnecessary detail and no plan. Neither of them worked out beyond the first 3 chapters. Looking back, it feels fitting for a child. Wattpad was a gateway to ideas and prose that I hadn't experienced yet. It was literally like letting a child loose in the adult section of a library. I read a lot of garbage, I'm not gonna lie. But I think back in 2014 we were all a little young and inexperienced and experimented with what inspired us. It was truly a simpler time with a lot of Jelsa, Dan and Phil, and One Direction fanfics.

I think what took up most of my time was the G/t community on Wattpad. Oh how small and budding we were in 2016. I was never a writer in the community, but I was a supporter of the stories being made and the ideas being produced. I remember the feeling waiting for some of the key authors or stories to publish new chapters. It was really the first dive I took into mild fantasy and I truly looked at literature from (excusing all the unintended puns) another view. I remember diving deeper into the tropes that were being used, the movie or tv inspirations, and all the sub genres that G/t brought. It's kind of sappy and a bit of a stretch, but the G/t community really shaped part of my mind to where it is today. I was sad when some of the authors ghosted their stories. I would be hyped whenever a oneshot book was updated or there was another story on the collection. I loved feeling like I was a part of something, however small it was.

On top of that, G/t brought me a lot of friends. I will get to the sob story a little later on, but I was able to find people who shared my interests in this community. While we don't talk anymore, for a good period of my life I had a group of friends from Wattpad who I texted every day and who I could tell anything I wanted to. They were unconditional listeners and some of the nicest people I have ever met. I would be lying if I said I didn't miss them a lot.

I stopped engaging with Wattpad around the time most of my friends and peers dropped off. By my Sophomore and Junior year of high school I stopped engaging. I don't know if the people I looked to for updates stopped updating or if I just grew up and away from the app or if it was simply the end of an era. I still continued reading on here and have even found amazing stories since then, but the app was purely for content and no longer a social app for me. It just comes with growing up.

Since then, a lot has happened. I'm in my junior year of college and getting my bachelors in Psychology and Theatre. I'm working a few jobs and have been looking around at grad programs to get my MA or Ph D. I feel miles away from the middle schooler I was when I started here. I'm definitely more in tune with writing academic papers than fiction now.

And with that time, I have done a lot of growing up. Again, I stopped engaging in the social aspect of the app at 16. While that age does not excuse the person I was at the time, I have definitely done a lot of growing. When I was peak on this app, I was in a bad place. I had really bad self-esteem issues, a problem with jealousy, and no idea of what I was doing wrong and how to handle myself. Every day was a search for validation and trying for "fit in" (whatever that meant to me at 16). I wrote a lot of angsty and angry posts on here. The early ones came from an honest place. I really hated myself and my body and the person I was. Did I need to blast that to people on a public app? Absolutely not, but I did it. As time went on, those posts were more for attention. Maybe they came from a small genuine spark, but they were mainly my way to process the jealousy I felt and find the validation I craved.

It was not and never was healthy. I was so hurtful to a lot of people and for no reason other than the parasocial relationships I formed and the hateful emotions I felt.

But the past is the past and I cannot take it back. I am now in therapy and doing a lot better. However, guilt is something that I struggle with. It's hard to learn to love yourself when you don't like the person you used to be. I would like to apologize to anyone in my past who might be reading this. I will not make any excuses for the person that I was at 16. That person still had a mind and knew right from wrong. I was a jealous person and I truly feel sorry for any words that I had said over this app that made anyone feel bad about themself or their choices. There are a lot of people who I met on this app and have no clue if they have deleted it or will even see this, but I want to apologize to all of them.

With that downer bit, I want to leave the person I was from 2014-2018 behind me. Do I miss the innocence and the simple issues of my Wattpad days? Yes. There is so much going on in the world and it all feels super overwhelming. But I also can look back and see that the past was not a good time for me. I miss the friends I had on here, but I can also look and appreciate the person that I have become. It truly feels like the end of an era. If anyone that I used to read or talk to sees this, hello and thank you for everything.