TO SAY THAT I loved Dave Matthews Band when I was a teenager would be both a dramatic understatement and an offensive affront to the ‘personal brand’ I cultivated as a tween. “Love” was for my devotion to *NSYNC or my affection for the Spice Girls. I did not “love” Dave Matthews Band. I was part of the very large, very devoted GrooGrux Nation — I was obsessed with them.

Every album, every song, every lyric was cataloged in my head with an encyclopedic fervor. The whole thing took on incredibly nerdy proportions. I have seen them almost 30 times in concert in venues all over the country, and I could tell what song they were going to play after striking the first chord. I paid $100/year to be a member of their fan website, which published an essay I wrote about sharing a DMB concert experience with my father. The essay frequently and earnestly employed the terms “life-changing” and “spiritual.”

So “love” is definitely not the right term for my DMB devotion — “psychofandom” is probably much more appropriate. The only thing greater than my devotion to Dave Matthews Band was my devotion to Dave Matthews Band Internet forums.

FOR ME, BECOMING obsessed with Dave Matthews Band was a route of escapism. I was a lonely 12-year-old, knock-kneed and hypersensitive. My family had just relocated from the city I grew up in to a WASP-y suburb of Philadelphia, and my parents were inching ever closer toward divorce. The summer before that first school year started was the most difficult: I knew no one my age, so the Internet was a welcome escape. I spent most of my time in the basement on our lone desktop PC, chatting on AIM with the friends I’d left behind in Allentown. There, I could also download DMB songs off of Kazaa and explore the depths of online DMB databases like DMB Almanac.

In June of 2002, when I was 14 years old, I joined Am I Dreaming, a Dave Matthews Band message board with topic threads on everything from lyrics to obscure song questions to tour discussions. My username was SeekUpPeaceDMB—“Seek Up” being the name of a DMB song, and with my new found hippie nature carved from the spirit of jam bands, slapping “Peace” on the end seemed the only appropriate thing to do. I listed my location as “The corner of Grey Street, end of the world,” another blatant song reference. On June 18, 2002 I replied to the thread “Do you ever close your eyes when listening to DMB or Phish or Bela Fleck?” with the embarrassingly earnest answer, “I do it every time I listen to DMB! It’s kind of embarrassing when I’m in public though… but I just can’t stop!”

According to my profile, which Google actually still indexes, I only posted to Am I Dreaming seven times over a two-year period. This is because I soon found a new message board outlet that would take over my social life with an aggression previously reserved for American Girl Dolls. The site was Nancies.org, a volunteer-run DMB community which took its name from the song “Dancing Nancies.”

The Nancies forums had an important hierarchy and set of rules that I had to learn in order to be accepted into the community. But I learned them; I was a lost, lonely kid desperately searching for human connection and someone to send me a bootlegged copy of the 3/23/93 Charlottesville show.

The more you knew about older DMB music, the better. Anyone who hopped on the bandwagon just because they liked the poppy “Everyday” album was harshly snubbed. Though there were several different message boards, power users rarely posted on the Music or Tour sections; the real community was located on the Off Topic boards, where groups of friends who had met at different shows—or sometimes had never even met at all—would congregate to discuss the details of their lives, share news and ideas and provide an online support system for those they accepted into the cabal. I became a fixture on the E/W thread, a late night thread for East and West coasters. Everyone else was in their 20s, so I was a bit of an oddity there. Many posters took me under their wing as their little sister, watching out for me, protecting me from trolls, and offering advice over AIM whenever necessary. We traded CDs of bootlegged shows through the mail and met up to pregame in the parking lot before concerts; it was all very 21st-century Grateful Dead.

The site doesn’t exist anymore, but some of the friendships I formed with several of the Nancies still do. James, a new fan from an intensely Christian family in rural Massachusetts, whom I’d visit whenever I got the chance to go to Boston. Shannon, an incredibly kind woman a handful of years older than me, became my older sister figure on the boards. Matt was just a few years older than me, hailed from South Carolina and sent me tons of recordings. One Nancies poster, Jacob, was a student at NYU, and my mom and I even crashed at his dorm one night after seeing a DMB show at Madison Square Garden. I’ve stayed in touch with these people over the years, either through text or Facebook or short visits.

When I tell people about this time in my life, their biggest question is always, “What did your parents think of all of this?” But this was in 2001 and 2002, years before sexting scandals and tell-all blogs instigated exaggerated outrage. My parents were essentially clueless about how the Internet worked or what I actually did on it. They tried their best to keep tabs on me, but there was only so much they could do beyond limiting my time spent online and checking my browser history, which I always remembered to clear anyway. They acted as chaperones at most of the DMB shows I went to, and never let me meet any of my Internet friends without being present. I think they were just grateful that my obsession centered around a band as wholesome and inoffensive as DMB, and that I hadn’t gone the goth route, donning Marilyn Manson t-shirts and ripped stockings.

IT’S POSSIBLE ALL that time spent on Internet forums detracted from time I could have spent attempting to make friends, or enjoying activities out in the real world. But the truth is that I did those things, too—I just didn’t enjoy them all that much. I was a solitary and sullen kid, and the message boards were a way for me to escape into a world where people were kind and familiar. It was a place where I felt people ‘got’ me, which is a rare thing for a 14-year-old girl to feel.

But when I find myself alone in a corner at parties, crippled by social anxiety and unable to generate the small talk that comes so naturally to most people, I wonder if the fact that I spent so much time on the Internet as a kid has anything to do with my inherent awkwardness.

The answer to this is: probably, but what can you do — except “celebrate we will, because life is short but sweet for certain.”