Before all this came about, I used to live a whole and content life. Up until the age of 22 I lived at home with my parents and worked as a receptionist at a cat rescue centre. Life was uneventful but simple then. I read the newspapers and cooked lentils and apart from a lovely holiday to Scotland where I saw more brilliant hues of green and white and blue than I had ever seen before in my life, I don’t remember much. It was at the cat rescue centre that I met my first partner J who I began a long term relationship with. I eventually moved out and got a flat with J. We stayed together for 4 years and it was during that time that I had my first encounters with technology. J bought me my first Nokia phone. I learnt to text with J (I still have one that I copied out on a sticky note to make it seem more permanent: “J, hav u fed cat? i cnt wait 2 cu ltr. luv H <3_xx”. More importantly, together we bought our first desktop computer and entered the world of digital technology and the acceleration of emails, internet connections and blogging.
Things started to go horribly wrong, though. It wasn’t just the case that we argued so much over who got to use the computer in the evening, but that we were keeping our secrets buried inside the computer. I was really into online shopping (perhaps to excess), but J was very defensive about his emails. I didn’t see the harm in me having access to his account if he had nothing to hide, but he wouldn’t let me in. It turned out that J had been in contact for several months via email with an old sweetheart from the last centre that he worked at and whenever I went home to visit my parents, he had secretly been having her to stay. I felt utterly cheated and unwanted. It felt as though someone had invaded our home. I felt contaminated and devoid of all sense and who I was and who I wanted to be. The relationship broke down.
After this, I went back to live with my parents and retreated from the world for about a year. I craved more than anything a community during this time. I did very little else during this time than surf the web, following threads on forums, reading a lot of horoscopes and articles on psychological burnout. I remember once putting my card details in to chat to a psychic via webcam from Brighton for half an hour. His face was pixelated but he told me in realtime about how I would undergo some major life changes in the near future, but go on to enlighten the world in important lessons concerning communication and crisis. When my mother suggested that I finally see a doctor, he suspected depression and put me on a course of SSRIs. With the help of my family and the medication, I decided to turn over a new leaf and start my life anew. Following from my interests in whole foods and healing, I decided to train as a yoga instructor and adopt a strict macrobiotic diet with regular detoxes and fasting. Despite these changes, I still continued to use the computer obsessively, redundantly. I felt very lonely and helpless if I did not have the monitor humming away and staring down wisely over me like an icon.
I decided, in the end that I needed to move on from the desktop computer that I had bought with J. It felt like the final step in getting over J and a move towards independence and individuality and happiness to get my own own personal laptop. It was really exciting not least because my laptop was portable and could be with me everywhere (even in the most mundane public places, which felt a little bit naughty – like sex in public places, maybe) but because I needed something more reliable to start a website for my yoga classes and hopefully even start a new business. I had big dreams. I also moved out again at this point, to live as independently in the real world as I did through my laptop.
Once I had the laptop, I immediately worked to set up my website and it was initially very successful. However, around this time I am embarrassed to admit that I also used internet sex chatrooms, sometimes up to 6 times a day. I ended up meeting 2 of these online encounters in real life, including one – I will refer to him as X – who was actually an IT specialist. He was a hard and at times volatile man to cope with. I won’t go into this too much. I saw him sporadically.
Ominously, it was around this time that details started to go missing both from my yoga website (such as class times, contact details) and the documents on my laptop, both personal and for business purposes. The most ominous incidents were were my face began to pixelated out of pictures on the websites and threatening emails from unknown addresses began to appear in my inbox, which later vanished.
Then the crisis came. One day when I anxiously opened up one of the attachments in these emails, something installed itself rapidly and within a few minutes, multiple windows popped and successively streamed down the page in alert. I lost control of the cursor. I realised that it had finally happened, my worst fears had been realised: my laptop was infected by a virus and I would have lost everything on it. Before too long, despite my best efforts, the interface had been broken down into a blue screen and raw symbols. The commands on the screen promised that I could save my computer and purchase replacement software for ‘serious system failure’ if I entered my personal and credit card details. It informed me that it had access to all my online passwords and usernames and would be able to use my online voice fraudulently. I was being blackmailed by malicious software. I didn’t understand malware at the time and unwittingly, I followed its commands hoping that the issues would resolve. They didn’t. I even got X the IT specialist to take a look at it, but like a cadaver he declared that it was a lost cause and that the virus had eaten out all the coding from the inside. He looked sort of darkly amused.
I have called this initial period after the viral attack my ‘javaconversion’ period. I felt as though my whole life and identity had been stolen. Without any point of reference, I had to start from the ground up. This was the onset. It was around two weeks of total depersonalisation, time and space seemed to blur in and out of their boundaries. I remember a distinct loss of sensation in my limbs and yet a heightened awareness of sounds and colours, a rapid response to stimuli in the few hours that I was spending awake in cold sweat. At times it was unbearable, at other times it was free floating and pleasant.
Once this period had elapsed, I returned for a period to a state of relative normalcy. I went back to leading my yoga classes and undertook a massive and replenishing detox in which I consumed nothing more than white beans and cucumber for a week. My family grouped together to buy me a new laptop and supported me in picking up the funds again to keep my yoga classes running. My friends emailed me pictures of us with me in them, so I could remember what my face meant to other people as an assemblage offlickering signifiers. However, before too long I was beginning to worry. All the time. I couldn’t quite locate the worry, it became a very surrounding sensation of worry being everywhere, hovering just outside my skin. Sometimes I would look in the mirror or the reflection of the black monitor screen in the second after it had been shut down for the night and I would feel a surge of panic, not entirely recognising who I was. It was uncanny. I started to wake up in the middle of the night with cold sweats, feeling as though there was an intruder somehow in and throughout me, not just in the room or in my house. As the weeks passed, I grew convinced that my lymph nodes were swelling up like toxic glass marbles in my throat and my groin and I would spend hours massaging them, checking for ominous signs before typing it into the internet later and establishing whether there were any other sufferers out there on forums. My joints ached, my heart palpitated and any cramp or sensation in my skull or my stomach would terrify me and I would lay down for hours at a time staring at the ceiling until it passed, just in case I sped up the damage.
I went to the doctor, but he told me that it was a bad case of hypochondria and that all he could suggest – given that there was no material or microbiological cause for these ongoing symptoms – was to take the SSRIs again that I had been prescribed for depression and tackle these anxieties rationally through CBT techniques, or put it down to stress. But I knew that something else was wrong. Even holistic remedies such as meditation and reflexology had no impact. I knew that I was more than traumatised from the viral attack on my laptop; I felt as though something essential to me had been stripped away, as though it had become part of me. I didn’t feel like ‘me’ anymore and that was frightening.
For about 8 months I experienced these symptoms:
- Widespread muscle pains (myalgia) and sensation of floating
- Heightened perception of sounds and colours
- Loss of appetite
- Generalised malaise
- Neurocognitive ‘mist’
- Elevated temperature
- Muscle tension
- Compulsive online purchases with credit that I could not afford
- Compulsive internet searches
I don’t know what the future hold at this stage. Sometimes I feel like I need to give in to my illness; after all, I enter states which the everyday experience of the majority of people will never allow access to. I am outside the system of medial control, I don’t experience the needs of other human beings. In many ways it seems liberating, but in others it seems unfair and when I am conscious I know that my body – or at least the body that I used to have – is in a state of decay.
I can only hope and let time and cyberspace flow through me.
I hope that you can all help me make sense of these strange experiences and find solace together.
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