Digimon Saved Me

In 1999 I was a chubby, lonely fifth grader with frosted tips. That's when I first watched Digimon, the television show that changed how I think about the internet and, in some ways, my life.

You might remember Digimon as the low-rent Pokémon clone with the ​theme song that sounds like it was engineered by NASA scientists to stick in your head. A group of seven kids all receive small gadgets—I guess we'd call them wearables now—called "Digivices" at summer camp. These Digivices let them travel to the "DigiWorld," the show's analogue for the internet. The DigiWorld is a lush, colourful, forested, and dream-like interzone, and it is there that the show's protagonists met their friends for life: Digimon, digital monsters.

I remember watching the show's first episode when I was just eight years old and being immediately stirred. I didn't have any real life friends at the time. Not to get overly personal here, but for most of my early life I was what you might call a "loser" by every popular definition of the word.

You can probably already guess why a show about kids making friends on the internet appealed to fifth grade me.

When the show's goggle-wearing hero Tai, the Ash Ketchum analogue of the bunch, first meets his Digimon, he's afraid. The monster is weird-looking, but also kind of cute. To comfort him, the monster says: "You don't need to be afraid of me, I'm your friend, I'm your friend, I'm your friend! Everything's going to be alright now, Tai. I've been waiting for you!"

I was gutted. All that I wanted in the world was for someone to tell me that everything was going to be alright now. And so Digimon became an escape.

I remember crying myself to sleep one night, around this time. I don't remember what happened to set me off, but it almost certainly had to do with feeling ostracized and humiliated by my classmates. That night, I had a dream that I remember to this day: I was in the DigiWorld, and I was happy. I had escaped, and I had friends, just like the kids in the show. I woke up, and I was devastated at the thought of facing my lonely reality again.

By the time the first movie came out on VHS in 2000, I remember being so embarrassed at the video rental store that I tried to convince my Dad that it was my little brother who really wanted to watch it. Digimon was kid's stuff, and I wasn't soft, or at least that's what I told myself.

This was also around the time that my family got our first high-speed internet connection. When we set up our clunky Dell desktop I already knew what I wanted to do. Digimon taught me that the internet was a way to make friends.

In the years that followed, I used the internet like the DigiWorld, as an escape when I needed it; MSN Messenger, and later, Tumblr, became a way for me to escape into a world where everything didn't suck. The internet in real life wasn't exactly a technicolour forested dream world, but that's how it felt to me.

I could come home from a terrible day at school and hop on the MSN chat network, knowing that my friend from another city would be there. We met offline just once. We had a far deeper and more meaningful relationship online—maybe because we weren't real people to each other, behind the screen. We were Digimon, and that was exactly what we both needed at the time.

During a five year stint on Tumblr during its early days, I made friends that I've still never met in person, and whom I'm still in contact with on social media. It's great to hear from them from time to time. (Lisa and Laura, if you're reading this, hey!)

I've matured since those lonely, early days spent mostly alone. I'm more secure and confident now. I'm okay, mostly. But I also have a more nuanced view of the internet now, too. Online communication—at one point, my lifeline—is as much a means of escape now as it as a tool for profit or for surveillance. Things aren't so colourful in the DigiWorld anymore.

But Digimon did have at least one important lesson for me, one that stands apart from all the nostalgia and the emotional debt that I owe it: the internet can still be a place for connection and growth, for solidarity and emotion, no matter how dark it sometimes seems.​