I met some of my closest friends to date the summer before eighth grade. At first, we were all just playing a game together based on mutual interest in a webcomic. However, gradually we began talking more and more about ourselves until the game was abandoned and our time spent together consisted solely of us chatting - about how much his Internet connection sucked, or how much they hated going camping, or how much she enjoyed that TV show.

I loved that summer. I felt we all just fell together, our broken pieces lining up to form a picture with holes and jagged edges that we were okay with because we knew nobody was perfect and we liked our jigsaw puzzles incomplete anyway.

Eighth grade began and I found myself flushed and gushing about my new friends at school. Looking back, I’m a little embarrassed at how easily I jumped at every opportunity to praise the virtues of the friends I made over summer. In my defense, I’d never met friends like them before. We were broken people, and among all of us filters didn’t exist like they do with classmates.

What made me grow more attached to this friend group over time was the diversity. One kid talked frequently about being the frontman of his own grunge rock band and often showed us videos of his band performing at various festivals. Sometimes he gave us lyrics to songs he was writing and asked for feedback or possible titles. Another friend, a phenomenal singer, came to us in excitement when she won coveted roles in school musicals or performed at talent shows. We were all genuinely proud of her and encouraged her every step of the way.

The person I knew the longest in this friend group loved to create elaborate costumes of their favorite characters. They attended several conventions over the past couple years showing off their work and sent us many beautiful selfies, in and out of costume. I’m very proud of them, especially for overcoming the stigma that comes with the perceived “self-absorbed” teenager taking selfies.

Yet another friend had difficulty getting out of bed some days. Her several mental illnesses and physical disabilities kept her from attending school for the full seven hours. Sometimes she would sleep for several days or forget to eat food for a week, but we loved her just the same.

A girl went through the entire course of a relationship within the time of the friend group’s existence. She thought she found someone perfect, who loved and truly understood her, only to find out he was taking advantage of her depression and guilting her into staying in the relationship. Upon this realization, she dumped him with flourish. We supported her and, on bad nights, reassured her that she was much, much better without him. On worse nights, we bandaged her razored wrists and gave her a warm soft sweater of compliments and love to wear like a bulletproof vest when she saw him again.

Our conversations jumped so quickly from the mundane to deeply personal that I almost lost myself, yet at the same time this eccentricity seemed normal in our little part of the world.

One late night, the singer friend confessed to us that she had taken a bottle of pills and felt overwhelming regret almost immediately as the overdose reached her stomach. The rest of us spoke quietly, our desperate, delicate reassurances muffled by tears that carved canyons into our cheeks - a legacy of sorts, to join those bad nights and abusive parents and bills that were too high and self-hatred and the bulimia that went undiagnosed. I remember that my chest felt tight with the memories that would never happen, her Broadway dreams, and her mother who loved her but didn’t know nights got this bad sometimes.

She lived, and we went on with life.

These people are the very ones who have shaped me into the person I am today. By interacting with these friends and supporting their diverse identities, I have come to discover and accept parts of my own identity. I learned that others existed who were like me, who wept Sunday nights because they felt their whole world crumbling around them. On Monday mornings, they were there to smile and greet me, complaining about how ridiculously early we had to wake up, and I’d know everything would be okay, for the rest of week at least. I learned that feeling unsure about your sexuality, gender, future, or all of the above was fine and teenagers who had a solid grip on their life were probably aliens anyway. I learned that people existed who would love and care for me unconditionally, regardless of if I liked art over math or got B’s on my report card or sang too loud or cried too much.

We’ve shared so much with each other and our lives have become so tightly interwoven that I’m not sure where I end and they begin. I never knew until now the importance of a support system in an adolescent’s life. A shame I could never touch my friends, hold them tight to send that wordless message they needed sometimes. I want so much to be able to attend one of the band frontman’s concerts or the singer’s performances or a convention or even just a state fair with them, but they are all too far away. A shame that my parents and classmates scoffed at these friends so easily, using a simple phrase or look to dismiss these people who have been such an integral part of my life, who have helped me so much when no one else could.

But hey, Internet friends aren’t real friends, right?