Sunny 101
OMG! You’re here!
You wanna know a little bit about me!
Cool! I can try!
My name is Sunny Crittenden and I live in a tiny house, in a tiny town called Elmvale, in Ontario, Canada with my partner Harold, and our cat, Smudge. Harold and I divide our time between my house in Elmvale (population 2000), and his apartment in nearby downtown Barrie, Ontario (population 213,000), so we get the best of both country and city living.
I’m an artist, writer, photographer, and muse, all of which I take as equally serious titles. I used to sell my paintings on Etsy, but I don’t make analog art anymore. Now I make all my art on my iPad with my Apple Pencil, from drawing my SunnyGrrrls to put on merch, to writing on Instagram or Patreon, to editing photos. I also put a lot of art on the blockchain, but not as much as I’d like to because I don’t have enough time to immerse myself in the culture anymore & I don’t wanna half ass it. I focus on creating art and figure I can always mint it or turn it into t-shirts any time.
I recently got divorced after 19 years of marriage and became a new sole homeowner, so I’m in the process of turning a significant portion of my living space into SunnyGrrrl Canada HQ. I also tore up my front lawn to put in a summer wildflower garden, as well as planted over 350 assorted (but carefully selected!) bulbs for the spring. The house is starting to have curb appeal, slowly but surely! And I have a million more miles to go with it!
When my former husband decided it was time for our marriage to end in 2021, we had joined FetLife and already tried polyamorous relationships, which is how I met Harold, who is notably 17 years older than me and quite possibly the love of my life! Together we make things happen! The best place to follow our antics is on Instagram for shorter posts about once a week, and Patreon for more detailed, longer form journal posts delivered straight to your inbox 2-3 times a month or more, depending on what’s going on. Plus goodies, if you choose! Check it out!
Right…but what else?
Here’s where you, a new person to Sunnyland, may think, okay cool Sunny, you sound like a lovely person, but there’s gotta be more to this? Why do weird people comment on your social media posts? Who are all these weird people in/on your Discord/Instagram/Facebook/Twitter? Why do strangers sometimes act excited to meet you in person?
This part’s getting weirder and weirder and harder and harder to explain the older I get, the more people I meet in person or try to have friendships with IRL, and the longer I live radically vulnerably on the internet.
Here we go…
When I got my first computer with Compuserve in 1997 the internet was very different than it is today, which you may already know because you were there, or maybe you weren’t even born yet, so you have no concept of what it might have looked like. Luckily for either case, my Angelfire website, which was started in 1998, still exists, and you can see pretty much exactly what the internet looked like back then.
My Angelfire website should either be fascinating or nostalgic for folks, or possibly horrifying if you’ve actually designed websites for a living. I’m good with any of those and take zero offence. Web “design” in the 90’s was very limited because you literally had to use what felt like robot language at the time to code a website, which I never got the concept of. I still don’t even know how to use CSS on this website! Regardless, that’s when I began living vulnerably on the internet, by posting photos of myself and Madison, and trying to write about my world publicly. I’ve maintained a website and web presence doing the same ever since.
It kinda gets weirder tho…
In 1999 I met Nicole Hughes from the band Scratching Post, and long story short, I toured around with the band to shows, wearing only panties and a t-shirt with the band’s logo, big boots, pigtails, and a smile, and I worked their merch booth. I sold CDs, posters, t-shirts, panties, stickers and related band merchandise, while advertising it on my body in a provocative way. I also wrote out a million “Hello my name is Dave” stickers with the band’s URL at the bottom to hand out at shows, which was a reference to their video for “Rock Past It” & made sure no one left anything behind at the clubs. I also often got up on stage to dance during their last song, “Destruction Of The Universe”.
Around the same time, a few days after 9/11 actually, I became a camgirl on one of the internet’s first, and certainly the most popular at the time, cam portals, and soon I became one of the most popular camgirls on that portal, with hundreds of thousands of people watching me and my new camgirl friends update and interact with each other on our webcams every day.
To put this into context, Jennifer Ringley of Jennicam fame started her 24/7 cam in 1996 and Ana Voog, the 2nd 24/7 camgirl, in 1997. Being a camgirl in 2001 wasn’t easy because you basically had to either be a geek, be friends with a geek, send a geek nudes, or be independently wealthy to afford the hosting and bandwidth required to run a public cam. This is why there were literally only hundreds of us doing this public reality performance art on the whole internet at the time.
The other catch was that streaming video was virtually impossible except through a cam-to-cam program called Netmeeting, an early version of what Zoom is today…except on dial up so it was very laggy, glitchy, and slow. That meant a live webcam at that time was a webcam that captured a live image at a specified interval and uploaded it to a public server. In the case of camgirls, it was every 30 seconds or fewer, so while I sat at my desk chatting to people on the cam portal’s “tagboard”/chat, my webcam would instantly take a photo of me at 320×240 resolution and upload it every 30 seconds. I didn’t do it 24 hours a day like Jenni or Ana, but I logged onto the cam portal multiple times a day to chat, and update my webcam so my “fans” could see what I was doing at that moment, or I’d leave it running while I was doing homework at my computer.
At first the cam portal was public and there were hundreds of thousands of people watching us for free all day and night, and then in 2002 it switched to a membership site, as most of us were getting naked and doing sexy things, and US laws changed, so verifying everyone was 18 on both sides of the cams became legally necessary. After the site became a paysite, we had tens of thousands of people watching us at any given time, but the difference was that this smaller pool of deviants were paying deviants, and we all had the opportunity to make a bit of spare change from our exhibitionist tendencies.
Our cam portal was still the most popular membership cam portal on the internet and the camgirls there were almost considered internet rock stars. I was personally mentioned, along with the portal, on Howard Stern, according to the million people who told me about it. Combine that with the fact I was still the Scratching Post panty girl, and I was writing about my life in a radically vulnerable way, publicly, on LiveJournal, documenting all the antics of my life from my life in college, my life as a single mom, and my life in a difficult and doomed long distance relationship. I was getting a LOT of attention for being the panty girl, for being a camgirl, and for my writing, both online and meatside, as well as getting sometimes up to 200 e-mails from individual people per day. I dubbed what I was doing as “textibitionism” because my writing was entirely compulsive, hypergraphic, and confessional journal entries full of truth and honesty (and a little unnecessary cruelty to those who did me wrong, that I chalk up to immaturity), plus I was getting naked, live on the internet every single day and nearly naked on stage on weekends, so how much more literal could a word I made up get?
People started recognizing me from the internet and approaching me in public when I was in Toronto or other cities larger than my small hometown, which stayed blessedly oblivious for the most part. This often happened at inappropriate times, making me uncomfortable. It happened once when I was with my dad, who didn’t know about “Sunny From The Internet” but I had to tell him. It happened multiple times when I was with my kid, but the worst was when it happened when I was alone because you never know the intentions of a stranger, especially when they act so familiar because they read about your life on the internet. Sometimes the person wouldn’t introduce themselves at all, but would e-mail me after the fact that they saw me somewhere. Strangers creeping on me in public without my knowledge! 😟 Thank god cell phones didn’t have cameras yet! Scratching Post Nicole could relate because her face and music were plastered all over Much Music at the time, Canada’s version of MTV, and we often got “rockignized” together. She thought it was funny and cool, but I was never comfortable with it, and started going out less and less.
Around this time, I also met Blake, who lived in Militiagan, USA, and we intentionally got pregnant and married at almost the same time, 8 months after meeting, so he moved into my apartment above my grama’s furniture store in Stouffvile, Ontario in 2002, with me and Madison.
I cammed all throughout my pregnancy with Wes, and Blake and I even appeared in a 30 minute Discovery Channel TV show called “The Sex Files”, where we simulated sex for educational purposes while I was in my 3rd trimester.
In 2003 and 2005, I was filmed in Toronto and Las Vegas for a documentary on cam culture, called “Camgirls”, which made it to Sundance, but never got a wide release due to financial issues. Regardless, I ended up with an IMDB credit for it!
In 2005, Blake and I bought our house in Elmvale and the internet was so excited for us! They’d been buying my paintings from my website to help with the down payment and had been following the progress and drama all along! Then when we actually moved in, Canada Day long weekend, folks from the internet sent us Canadian Tire money and housewarming gifts from Sears like a weed whacker, a lawnmower, all new bedding, and other essential home care items! Thank you, internet!
Moving an hour and a half north of my evil grandmother, and my whole family by proxy, was strategic and necessary for the overall health of our young family due to past trauma, but it was also extremely isolating. Nicole, and a ride to my whole Scratching Post community whenever I needed one, was no longer 20 minutes away. I’d also developed a fear of using the phone or having 1-on-1 conversations because I’d learned the hard way how easily I could be gaslit over the phone or what could happen when there were no witnesses. The only form of communication that seemed honest and real to me was text-based, on the internet, because the internet was forever and there could be a record of everything ever said, to read and reread, to be sure I understood and that I wasn’t being manipulated. I was writing around 3000 words a day on LiveJournal about my life based on this unshakable belief and disbelieving in secrets for myself, because secrets also proved to be harmful. They could be used as leverage to manipulate you. So I just lived/live by not having any. (I’ll keep yours though. A wisdom that came with maturity…admittedly a little late. 😕)
Before we moved to Elmvale, I’d also started staying home a lot because Blake and I had to share a car, which he needed every day for work while I was home with the kids, and there never seemed to be an opportunity for me to drive anywhere or go anywhere by myself. This, combined with strangers from the internet recognizing me when I was alone, or being creepy and generally freaking me out, made me stop leaving the house altogether.
I chose existing on the internet over the real world, to the very best of my ability.
By the time we moved to Elmvale, I was legitimately agoraphobic, but being plunked in a new town, where I didn’t know a single person, Blake still needed the car to get to and from work, and I didn’t know the roads well enough or have any money to go anywhere even if I did have a car, was a whole new level. I was terrified of driving on unfamiliar roads or being confronted by someone from the internet when I was with my kids, so I just stayed home and let Blake do all the driving.
Despite my whole real world being contained to one house and 3 people, I was happy and coping, and finding joy in the day-to-day life you have spending your days with little kids, or exploring or improving a new home, and sharing it on the internet. I was also painting every day and selling the art on my website, making just enough to keep making more art and eating a meal in a restaurant every now and then. I was sharing my struggles with agoraphobia and anxiety online, but didn’t want to sound conceited as to the reasons why it started. I didn’t want my readers, or fans, or followers, or internet friends, or whatever you wanna call these people, to think they were harming me and make me stop writing.
Some of these strangers were e-mailing me saying I gave them hope for their own futures due to my ability to process trauma on the page. Or that sitting down with a cup of tea and my LiveJournal posts were the highlight of their day at a shitty job, so here’s a book from your wishlist. Or that my webcam cured their erectile dysfunction and made them not kill themselves. Or that they did the craft or activity I did with my kids, with their kids and they had the best time making memories. Or that they talked about me with their spouses over dinner every night like I was family. Or simply that I was their favourite writer. Period.
How could I accept, let alone explain, that some of those people were the same kinds of strangers that would come up to me in public like golden retrievers happy to see me, and that this was somehow a problem for me? It would seem ungrateful and it might seem like I was too fragile for internet fame.
Around 15,000 unique IP addresses were reading my LiveJournal daily at this point, with peaks reaching 30,000 in February-March, around Steak & Blowjob Day because my (now embarassingly outdated) guide to sucking dick was/is linked on their official, original website. I’m not sure how those numbers would translate to today’s internet, but 2000’s internet was much smaller, so those were insanely good numbers for just a personal blog whose only advertising was a webcam you had to be a paying member of a different website to see. I stopped watching any kind of traffic stats after that point because they were literally making me anxious to the point of partial paralysis on one side of my body, about the potential of any of those people making me face the real life consequences of posting my online content, for better or for worse.
In 2006, I had a psychotic break and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder I, generalized anxiety disorder, and officially, agoraphobia.
The psychiatrist who diagnosed me, after seeing me for a full 2 years and trying a new cocktail of meds every few months, wrote a letter for my medical file and for the government, that stated I was so fucked up from early life (click here to read my origin stories) and experiencing psychosis, that I would probably never be able to have any kind of traditional job or career, that being a parent and taking care of myself was all that could realistically be expected of me. This was a devastating blow for me considering before we got married, I’d told Blake earnestly I’d make my first million before he would.
All throughout this mental health ordeal, I was obviously writing every detail about it on LiveJournal and my own website. In fact, during my psychotic break, I was chatting on IRC (a very early chat program sort of like Discord) to people who weren’t there because Blake had turned the wifi off, but I was convinced, I knew in my very soul, that my internet fame meant Oprah was about to come a-knockin’ to give me accolades any minute! But none of it was real.
On LiveJournal, you could do these things called “phone posts” where you could call a phone number, leave a voice message that would then be uploaded to LJ as an audio file, and usually someone would volunteer to transcribe it. I was making these posts from a payphone when I was hospitalized, unbeknownst to any of the staff who were treating me. That’s how important communicating with the internet was to me. (1, 2, 3, 4)
From 2006 to 2010, I stayed home with my kids and tried to give them the best life I was capable of, while still maintaining my own literal sanity as my psychiatrists tried every medical cocktail conceivable, to find the magic combination that would put a floor and ceiling on my moods for good. I started painting my mixed media SunnyGrrrls and selling these paintings on Etsy for decent prices, plus I was getting the odd commission here and there. I wasn’t making any real money, it wasn’t a business or a job, it was just enough that selling a painting meant taking the family out for a meal or buying a video game, and having enough left over to fund the next painting. I was never business savvy enough to earn an actual living with them, and no one seemed willing to help me, but they were beautiful, and sparkly, and I loved painting them so I just churned them out week by week, while still writing vulnerably on LiveJournal about my life and family every day.
People were still e-mailing me about how important to their day to day lives I was and commenting on my posts. I was still camming every day despite weight gain due to medications and experiencing massive body dysphoria due to a lifelong eating disorder. I was afraid to be happy, but somehow still cheerful among the low points, and I always tried to highlight or amplify that, to show gratitude to the universe for those moments and to have a public record to look back on later, which is why I think folks were still reading my posts. Plus, I was always excited about a new art thing and people were glad I survived my psychotic break, eager to see me rebuild myself back into the camgirl rock star I was before I got married and went crazy. I was only 30, after all.
Then something miraculous happened!
I got a job working from home doing customer support for a massive adult webcam site, due to the years of experience I’d racked up in the industry in front of the camera. Suddenly I had a purpose and my own money and the only person who could fuck it up or take it away from me was me. It wasn’t my family’s thing, it wasn’t my kids’ thing, it wasn’t Blake’s thing, it was my thing and my thing only because I was an expert at it. I signed the NDA and have never really talked about it since, but it probably saved my life and it’s still the reason I wake up every day because I love it.
But almost as soon as this miracle occurred, tragedy struck and not 8 or 9 months later, I fell ill with pancreatitis and almost died.
I spent 3 months in the ICU of 3 separate hospitals, in an out of comas with only a 30% chance of surviving, kidneys failing, emergency bedside surgery, waking up disfigured with a tracheotomy and no idea what happened, relearning how to walk….it was a whole ordeal that my internet audience followed on Facebook because Blake was keeping everyone updated, and when I did wake up from the coma after healing for a couple of months, a fan bought me an iPad with a SIM card so I could use the internet to keep myself entertained and everyone updated because hospitals didn’t have wifi yet.
For the whole year following, I was very sick or still healing from the massive wound I had from the bedside surgery, which meant home nursing every day and finally surgery to put my belly back together again (massive ventral hernia). I wrote about every detail on my site or LiveJournal or Facebook, supported mostly by Blake, my mom, and people I only knew from the internet, so a lot of people from the internet feel like they went through it with me, which in a way, they did. I almost died, like for real, and it was very dramatic so folks followed along, sent me cards, and sent Blake donations to help cover my missing wages and added cost of hospital life.
After that, my bipolar meds still weren’t stable, and worse, I had chronic pancreatitis because my pancreas had gotten so damaged from almost dying originally that it was just crapping out. And every time I had pancreatitis, my pancreas was damaging itself further, making me sicker and more prone to pancreatitis every time, like a vicious cycle. I was also still agoraphobic, unable to even walk to the end of my driveway to get a newspaper because I was so scared of the people passing by in cars. I was still camming and writing online every day though, and still making art and being the best wife and mom I was capable of being under the circumstances. I did a couple of art shows in Toronto during this time, and Blake and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary with a dinner at Haugen’s BBQ in Port Perry for our family, and a big party at our house with friends afterwards.
Around 2015, after all the doctor’s appointments died down and I had more capacity for living life, than living in an ER, I googled myself for the 1st time in a decade, and I found a forum where it appeared as though many people were saying terrible things about me, and linking to LiveJournal posts out of context as proof to back up their awful claims. They were just trolls, and I suspect mostly one troll with a vendetta and a bunch of sock puppet accounts, but I didn’t know that at the time. Since I took/take the internet so seriously, these awful judgments, threats, and accusations became like a soundtrack in my not-properly-medicated, already-anxiety-ridden, bipolar brain and over a period of months, and without even a therapist to help me process this, I became hypomanic, which ultimately lead to a suicide attempt, hospitalization, and a 6 week, court ordered separation from Blake.
After that, I officially abandoned LiveJournal and only wrote journal posts on Patreon, behind a paywall, because I figured anyone giving me $1/month to read my writing, probably wasn’t there to abuse me or make my life more difficult, which has proven to be true, and where I still mostly write long-form to this day. I also write shorter-than-Patreon posts on Instagram.
Also in March 2015, the cam portal I’d been on since the beginning closed after 15 years of operation.
I tried making YouTube videos and livestreaming on various platforms afterward, but ultimately hated seeing myself on video, and being “on” in front of an audience with no delay was exhausting with what felt like little reward. I stuck it out for a few years, mostly streaming myself making art, but I officially retired from camming in 2019. I still make adult content for MFC Share and Fansly though. 😏
There have been a lot of highs and lows during the last almost 25 years of textibitionism, both IRL and online, and my fans, followers, internet friends, cyberpals – whatever you wanna call them – have kinda been through it all with me, so they feel like they know me, while I know literally nothing about most of them. This is called a parasocial relationship and is a relatively new phenomenon that occurs with people in media, and I guess I’m one of them. And it’s not even that I have a million followers, it’s quite the opposite actually because after my suicide attempt in 2015, I tried to shrink my online presence, while still staying public, as not to attract more attention from trolls. Now I just have a small, but dedicated, following across the internet, who know almost everything about me because I put everything out there, and I don’t believe in secrets.
So, that’s why, sometimes, strangers come up to me in public or leave me comments like they’re golden retrievers happy to see me. I mean that in the nicest way possible, they’re my peeps and they just wish me well, which is awesome! (I think it’s a lot like compersion.)
No matter where I am, what I’m doing or what kind of project I’ve gotten myself into, the internet is always there by my side, rooting me on along the way, like a man-made universe full of karma, and that’s how it’s been since the moment I logged onto Compuserve for the first time in 1997. I don’t know if it’s delusional to say I have a special relationship with the internet, but I feel I kinda do.
These days I’m trying to be more okay with the tiny bit of internet fame I still have, as I re-enter the real world and meet more people IRL who often know of me from the internet before my meeting them.
As it turned out, my marriage was the thing making me so anxious all along. Divorce agreed with me and I now live this vagabond life with Harold, where we could be photographing waterfalls on Manitoulin Island one week and going to a kinky play party or concert in Toronto the next. I think I’ll always have agoraphobic tendencies, but I wouldn’t say I’m agoraphobic anymore because I go so many places and see so many things and meet so many people! I don’t take clonazepam anymore and my bipolar meds, which have been stable since 2015, never changed, the difference was ending the marriage! The bonus was meeting Harold. <3
Medically, I still have chronic pancreatitis and that lead to a type 1 diabetes diagnosis in 2021. I’m learning to live with it, but that’s a whole other, boring story.
And that’s, more or less, the story of me. This version, anyway.
Peace out, Girl Scouts!
Sunny
December 3rd, 2024