The Second Life

In the virtual world I was tall. Confident. Wore things I’d never wear in the mirror. Spoke in a voice I didn’t recognise. Turns out that voice was mine all along.

I found it during Covid. Everyone did. The world closed and the internet opened and suddenly people were building lives inside screens because the ones outside had stopped working.

Mine had stopped working long before Covid. But the virtual world gave me something the real one couldn’t. A blank slate. An avatar that wasn’t carrying thirty-nine years of damage. A version of me that could walk into a room and not immediately calculate who was angry and where the exits were.

I built a character. Not a lie. A translation. The same person, rendered without the weight. Without the eating disorder and the flinch and the voice in her head that said you’re not attractive any more every time she caught her reflection.

She was beautiful. Obviously. Everyone’s avatar is beautiful. But hers was beautiful in a way that felt like mine. Like what I might look like if nobody had ever told me what I should look like instead.

I made friends. Real ones. Through headsets and voice chat and the particular intimacy of talking to someone at 1am when neither of you can see the other and all you have is honesty and the sound of breathing.

I built things. Virtual rooms. Spaces. Designs. The skills I had in the real world, the coding and the creating and the problem-solving, they worked there too. And nobody asked how I learned them. Nobody questioned whether a woman who’d been hiding in a bedroom for a year was qualified to create something beautiful.

I just created it. And people liked it. And that was enough.

The virtual world saved me. I know how that sounds. I know people will read it and think how sad. A woman in her late thirties finding herself through a screen.

It’s not sad. It’s resourceful. When the real world takes everything from you. Your confidence. Your body. Your voice. Your belief that you have anything to offer. And a virtual one gives it back.

You take it. You take whatever version of yourself you can find. And you build from there.

I’m still building. In both worlds now. The real one catching up with the virtual one. Slowly. Carefully. Room by room.

But she was there first. The avatar. The version of me that existed without permission.

She showed me who I could be.

I’m becoming her.