In the middle of the night, between the time of watching, my reality television shows to the time I'm supposed to be sleeping, I felt that it was the appropriate time to enter a chat room for the first time in years. I wish I could say it was a simple decision, but I probably had a tougher time trying to decide what to eat for lunch the next day. I know it probably wasn't a good idea, but the curiosity took over. We all had those moments in middle school where we logged on to some sort of chatroom (for us, it was Omegle or Chat Roulette) and decided it would be fun to talk to some stranger that claimed to be sixteen and were actually forty. Too bad I am not in middle school anymore or else I would think that this would be much more of an appropriate venture.

Fine, middle school wasn't the last time I went on a chatroom. The most recent time occurred when I was with my friend during our junior year and we decided to go to the video chatroom. Thinking I was smart, I didn't show my head so the person chatting with us could only see our shirts. Also thinking that I could really lure someone in with my voice (I am not quite sure to this day what my definition of "luring" was), it ended up being twenty minutes of different people kindly letting me know that my voice was annoying and me asking the other people we chatted with if they felt my voice was annoying. Oh, and they told my friend that she has "a nice rack." Needless to say, my annoying voice did not lure anyone in that day. The response of my "luring" could have also been due to me binge eating some pretzels from the cabinet while video chatting.

Anyway, I decided to remove myself from the video chat atmosphere and plant myself in the classic virtual chatroom arena. Besides the fact that my face is something no one should see at midnight, I felt that the more "interesting" characters lurked on the chatrooms where showing faces wouldn't be a requirement.

So, I went on the website thinking that I would find the "usual" chatroom-goers: h***y teenagers, h***y adults, people in their twenties with absolutely no reason to be on there, h***y older people pretending to be h***y teenagers, and more h***y teenagers. You can guess the kind of people I really expected to be on the website. It just made me more ashamed to take part in it just because I was curious. The site contained two kinds of chats: a public chat with everyone on the site and a private chat that one user can request with another. In the public chat, you were able to write anything to the entire forum. Most people took the chance to write something that involved their gender, if they were h***y, how h***y they were at the moment, and the body part they liked the best in whoever they were looking for (I'm sure you readers can make a guess on what those parts are). For me, i took this chance to write different things in the chat to see what kind of users would try to write to me privately. When just writing my height, I received people either saying "Hey" or people asking if I want to do things that would make The Huffington Post editors blush (As you can see, I am trying to impress Arianna Huffington with the activities I do during my free time). Let me tell you, it is quite hard to try and stay cavalier about the things that some of these people ask you, and they have absolutely no shame.

It is also shocking to me the type of people you find in these chatrooms. While some are either teenagers or people pretending to be teenagers, there is also a select group of people that totally own their age and their marital status. Throughout my little "experiment," I received, chats from people that were part of the over-sixty crowd that were looking and "ready for whatever someone wanted to do with them." I also received chats from married people that were either bi-sexual or bi-curious. At one point, I put my username as "Male/17," and I was getting chats from married people that said they were forty and over. It truly made me wonder what kind of people really go to these websites. I never really thought about the people that live their seemingly "normal" lives during the day and then enter these websites at night. Honestly, I thought of the older people on this website as deranged pedophiles that lurk on these websites throughout the entire day, and those people are definitely on these websites. On the other hand, the people that watch talk shows and take their kids to school during the day are some of the people that are on these websites as well. It was strange for me to think that the people who used to follow Oprah's Book Club and made extravagant Sunday dinners could also be some of the people that go on these sites and escape from their normal lives. Many people have more confidence when their faces are not shown on the computer screen, and I am guilty of that as well.

But, there was someone that truly changed the way I viewed these chatrooms. I was lurking around the site myself when I received a chat from someone who claimed they were a nineteen year old male. I still had my username as "Male/17," and I assumed that was the reason why this person sent me a private chat. Since I am usually a paranoid person (and paranoid people definitely should not be on any sort of anonymous chatroom), I always kept my guard up because I always assumed that I could have been talking to some older married person that posed as a nineteen year old college student. We were casually chatting, and he revealed that he was bi-sexual. In "normal" circumstances, this would be the moment where the two people chatting would go into some flirty conversation while still keeping it anonymous. Or, as I noticed on these chatrooms, this would be the moment where one user would ask the user for video chat (for the record, I never did that). But, I could tell that he had his reservations about me being someone that I didn't say I was because he told me that it was a secret and no one knew about it. From there, a casual conversation turned to a moment where I tried to encourage him to be positive and allow himself to be happy with who he is. Unfortunately, I had to decline his request to email me privately because, no matter what someone says, I still have reservations about truly believing someone is who they truly are behind a computer screen. Although I was honest about who I was, I cannot assume that about someone else when their username doesn't even have their name on it.

Whether this person was really who he was or not, it didn't change the way I looked at chatrooms in general. Despite realizing that, no matter what age, a chatroom is probably not the place to hang around for me, it was a place for people that didn't have the confidence to show their true personalities besides behind a computer screen. These chatrooms weren't only the wasteland (some would say gold mine) for the h***y and creepy. This was a place for people to escape their own personal lives to have a chance to be themselves in a place where no one would know your name unless you told them. This doesn't mean I would ever suggest to anyone to basically live in their chatroom, but I do want to recognize these sites for how it seems to affect some of the people that go on it. I was flattered and also sad for the guy who told me that what I told him that night was "truly amazing." I felt even worse when he told me he wished he could talk to me outside of the chatroom and then ask for my email address. I don't know if he will ever see this article, but I am writing it for him, and I am writing it for the people that feel the same way as he did.

To the person in the chatroom that night: I am sorry that we were never able to talk outside of the chatroom, but I hope you understand my reservations for not continuing the chat. We talked about a month ago, and I hope that you have found or are finding changes in your life. Please know this: Your true self should not be minimized and hidden behind a computer screen. You deserve to have an amazing life, and the world is waiting for you to go live it. I know I told you this when we were chatting originally, but I will tell you this again: although it is a big step in your life, don't be scared to tell your family and friends who you really are. The people in your life that truly love you will always be there, and being who you really are will only make them love you more. For the people that don't accept your true self, well, they do not deserve to be in your life in the first place. Close your computer and go outside. The people that truly care for you will always love you, and you don't need a chatroom to show the love that you already have.