your neopets are starving
I’ve been playing Neopets for over twenty years. That’s a sentence that makes me pause for sure. Two decades of feeding virtual pets, chasing pixelated riches, and navigating a website that somehow managed to survive this long. It’s crazy. But it’s deeper than that, isn’t it? This silly little website has shaped me as a creator, as someone who breathes and lives to make things.
Neopets fed the fire of my childhood creativity in ways I didn’t recognize at the time. Writing characters backstories for my pets consumed me. I obsessively coded my userlookup and petpages—my first introduction to HTML and CSS. And man, the community. A couple of those neofriends became real, lasting friends. People I share coffee with, talk about love, talk about politics. People who grew up alongside me in this strange digital space, people that now have divorces and heartbreaks of their own, just like me.
It’s surreal that here I am, in 2025, still playing the fuck out of this website. How many tear-filled nights did this little site get me through? Too maby.
But lately, I’ve been playing Neopets while feeling an emotion I’m unfamiliar with: happiness. I feel happy. Not just in fleeting moments, but in a way that feels consistent, undeniable, something I can trust instead of second guess. That’s some weird shit, dude.
Happiness has never felt like a permanent state for me. It’s always been something just out of reach, something I could hold onto for a moment before it inevitably slipped away. Security, love, stability—those things felt temporary at best, illusions at worst. But now, for the first time in my life, I feel truly, lastingly safe. And it’s almost unsettling.
The world is on fire. Fascism is rising, in this country and in others. There’s a constant undercurrent of doom running through every news cycle. And yet, in the midst of all that, I find myself waking up every day feeling secure in a way I never have before. It feels almost rebellious to let myself experience this joy, this peace. Like I should be bracing for impact. But I’m not. Not anymore.
My aunt said something to me recently that stuck. She said that my ex-husband loved me in spite of myself. Now, I’m loved because of myself. And that distinction is something I’m still turning over in my mind. It feels strange. It feels right.
I spent so much of my life feeling like I had to be tolerated, accommodated, managed. That I was too much, too intense, too complicated. I twisted myself into smaller versions of who I was just to fit into the spaces other people carved out for me. But now, I am fully, unapologetically myself—and I am loved because of it. There is no caveat, no hidden condition, no quiet expectation for me to change or shrink. And that, too, feels strange in the best way. I’m not asking for too much.
And the strangest revelation of all: I never fucking was.
So here I am, two decades into a game I was supposed to have outgrown, in love in a way I never thought possible, creating every day, existing in a state of joy I never trusted before. The world outside is dark, but inside this small corner of my life, the light is warm. And for once, I don’t feel the need to question whether or not I deserve it. I just let it be.