FABLED.DAY: ravendays

What was RavenDays? It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d have admitted to being part of at the time, that’s for sure. Back then, I treated it like a shameful secret never be revealed beyond the browser window. I was constantly deleting my browser history extra-carefully and using a burner email attached to a burner email. The latter is significant because most children (and yes, I was quite the literal child) couldn’t have fiddled with such a thing at all, but I was persistent. It felt like some kind of secret society online at the time. Now, I see it as a particularly meaningful part of my teenaged years.

To explain RavenDays, though, I should probably mention how I found RavenDays.

On April 20th, 1999, two armed teenagers entered their high school in Columbine, Colorado. Their names were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and they shot fourteen people before turning their weapons on themselves. It was the worst and most egregious school shooting America had yet seen. In the months that followed, the media would explore youth culture, alienation, and bullying in deep detail, as if trying to sort out exactly what had gone wrong at Columbine, fruitlessly.

Many news outlets initially pushed a narrative suggesting that the two teen boys were the subject of vicious bullying prior to their rampage. Later investigation determined this narrative to be largely false, though. The two boys weren’t outcasts (not exactly). Most of what I’ve read about Columbine that comes from primary sources looking into the issue in earnest seems to suggest they had rather normal social standing despite their obvious emotional turmoil. Their violence almost certainly had other primary motivations.

Columbine’s story wasn’t done there, though. It would become even more complicated with the injection of religion. Soon, we’d get the story of Cassie Bernall, who died at Columbine, in the form of She Said Yes. The story goes that, during the shooting, Eric asked Cassie if she believed in God. Cassie said yes, and Eric shot her. In the book, Cassie’s mother writes about her daughter’s journey to Christ. It’s the (alleged) story of her ultimate tragic martyrdom at the hands of Eric Harris. Later reports from eyewitnesses suggested the exchange that inspired the book (ie, Cassie professing her belief in God) didn’t happen, but the book proved widely influential regardless.

Still, the topic of bullying hung heavy in the air after the Columbine massacre. For some reason, it just wouldn’t clear from the air. In those days (and perhaps still, I’m unsure), most of us had to watch Channel One, a short news clip daily at school. The program did a feature on bullying soon after Columbine, inspired by and yes, decidedly milking the tragedy. Channel One was nothing if not covertly corporate, resembling prehistoric clickbait, complete with commercials, after all…

The Channel One feature (surely lost media now) mentioned some “online resources.” I was bored and visited them out of curiosity. They were almost all awful. I’m sure you’d expect that if you ever saw Channel One. Most just reiterated some of the “anti-violence” talks we’d gotten as part of the DARE program. These materials assumed bullies were feral, solo creatures bidden to attack at random. These bullies could be defeated by the power of friendship or something. Y’know, unlike real life bullies who tended to hunt in packs because they were part of existing privilege structures, often quite powerful socially, and rarely the outcasts themselves. I chuckled sadly.

Still, it put the idea in my head, of reading about this “situation” online. I started searching on my own (using AltaVista, if I remember right) for sites by bullied teens. In 1999, I was surprised to find the internet buzzing with just that. It seemed like there were many sites by, for, and about the subject of bullying and how to handle it. Most were by people in their teens, as was I at the time. Somehow, I ended up on RavenDays, a site with a small mailing list which might best be described as a “support group” for those who’d struggled with bullies.

The title sounds vaguely “goth” but likely had a different intention. Despite the milieu of the early 2000s, the site never adopted that kind of tenor. It wasn’t some kind of goth aesthetic, nor did it lean into the silly idea of “oppressed loners.” I seem to remember a poem of all things called “Raven Days” as the site header - written by a midcentury poet? Searching for the poem brings up one by Sidney Lanier, but I’m not sure.

RavenDays’s mailing list was a relatively safe place, fairly well-moderated in the early 2000s sense of the term. I joined but rarely posted, mostly just lurking and reading other people’s stories, posts, and even tips for coping with being a Designated Outcast (as many of us were).

I felt a great release when I realized I could discuss this with other people who had also experienced it. This was in the days of a more decentralized web, when a website usually stood on its own rather than fitting into the woodwork of an existing social media site. I enjoyed the freedom, anonymity, and obscurity this afforded. This was true particularly when it came to discussing sensitive topics like bullying and being othered.

Through RavenDays, I found other sites, met people, and forged friendships based on similar experiences. I immediately fell into my usual teenaged pattern of lying about my age, pretending to be several years older than my wee age at the time. Most people on RavenDays at least tacitly accepted that, though I didn’t exactly act mature or pass as an older teen. In fact, I earnestly befriended some folks from RavenDays and related sites, slowly, but often concealed information about myself, often for years. It was probably not the safest online environment, and I knew that. I felt somewhat comfortable, sharing and opening up, though, because of the anonymity and obscurity of it.

I met a slightly-older kid from Canada. He was actually the age I pretended to be, and knew a lot about the stuff I pretentiously wanted to do, which made it awkward to be friends at first. We bonded over the shared experience of bullying in North America, though. For both of us, some of it had, ironically, been religiously-motivated. This was just one example of how the narratives surrounding school culture in America just didn’t line up back then. Cassie Bernall had allegedly been shot at Columbine after proclaiming her love for Jesus. Both this Canadian kid and I had been viciously bullied for not being on the Jesus bus, so to speak. Make it make sense, mainstream media. What were they trying to tell us, and why didn’t it match what our experiences told us?

That Canadian fellow in particular helped me contextualize a lot of my bullying experiences, too. A few minutes ago, I messaged the very same guy, this time on Discord, asking if he had any tips for helping me to not constantly worry about Russia. Kinda similar if you think about it, but we talk about other things too over the years.