---

✧ Welcome To Sunnyland ✧

---

---

Right…but what else?

---

---

My Origin Story

---

---

My childhood is kind of a long story…

---

---

Then I Grew Up!

---

Scratching Post Panty Girl

In 1999 I met Nicole Hughes from the Canadian, indie, pop-metal band Scratching Post, and long story short, I toured around with the band to shows, wearing only panties and a t-shirt each with the band’s logo, big boots, pigtails, and a smile, working 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”.

---

The Naked Nerd

Around the same time, a few days after 9/11, I became a camgirl on one of the internet’s first, and certainly the most popular at the time, cam portals, known as “Portal 9” on StileProjectDotCom. 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.

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”/text-based 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.

CAMWHORE

Stile’s portal became CamwhoresDotCom, a paid membership site – but still the most popular membership cam portal on the internet – with the camgirls there almost being 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, and I was getting a LOT of attention! Sometimes I’d get 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, 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?

---

Being “Rockignized” IRL = The Beginning Of My Nightmare

People started recognizing me from the internet IRL 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” so I had to tell him. It happened multiple times when I was with my daughter, 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! 😟

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, as she called it. She thought it was funny and cool, but I was never comfortable with it, and started going out less and less.

---

Buying Sunnyland

In 2005, my former husband and I bought our house in Elmvale and the internet was so excited for us! They’d been buying my paintings and zines 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 snail mailed 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 (who had lived next door), 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. My best friend Nicole, and a ride to our whole Scratching Post community whenever I could get a babysitter, was no longer 20 minutes away.

---

Where in the world is Elmvale?

---

---

Fear Of Verbal Communication

I’d 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 that way 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 in public posts on LiveJournal about my life based on disbelieving in secrets for myself, because secrets also proved to be harmful in my experience. 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. 😕)

Fear Of Driving Crept In

Before we moved to Elmvale, I’d also started staying home a lot because my former husband and I had to share my 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 potentially 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.

A Hotbed For Agoraphobia

By the time we moved to Elmvale, I was already legitimately agoraphobic, but being plunked in a new town, where I didn’t know a single person, where my former husband 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 my own 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 by myself, so I just stayed home and let my former husband do all the driving…for almost 20 years.

Despite my whole real world being contained to one house, three people, a cat, and two dogs, 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 audience, or whatever you wanna call them, to think they were harming me and make me stop writing about my life.

Validation To Keep Going Came At A Cost

---

Analytics = Nail Biting Paranoia

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, there were only millions, not billions of people online at the time, so those were insanely good numbers for just a personal blog. Especially one whose only advertising was word of mouth and 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 along with accolades from strangers came death threats, threats to have my kids taken away or mess with my RL in some way, and horrible predictions about my them when they grew into adults. The potential of any of the people behind those IPs making me face the real life consequences of posting my online content made me too anxious to look at Google Analytics until long after the internet was “dead” and abandoned for social media.

---

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 and experiencing psychosis, that I would probably never be able to have any kind of traditional or regular employment, 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 my former husband earnestly that 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 my former husband had turned the wifi off. I was convinced, I knew in my very soul, that my internet fame meant Oprah was about to come a-knockin’ to show me my rightful place in the world 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 from the psych ward using my credit card, 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)

---

---

You know when she shaves her head, then gets out the red hair dye, something’s probably up!

People were still e-mailing me about how important to their day to day lives reading about my journey was and commenting on my posts. I was still camming naked every day despite weight gain due to medications and experiencing massive body dysmorphia due to a lifelong eating disorder.

I was afraid to be happy, because psychosis was simultaneously the happiest I’d ever been and the scariest experience of my life, yet I was usually somehow still able to see the bright or humorous sides of shitty times and situations. I always tried to highlight or amplify that in my posts, to show gratitude to the universe for those moments because I think you get back the vibes you send out.

That’s why folks told me they were still reading my posts, that I could still be “Sunny” despite the psychic and emotional baggage I was literally born with, plus all the shit the universe had thrown at me to this point. It made me feel like I had value, even when I was at my lowest with $0 income and a bleak employment future.

---

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 “pioneering” what was then a whole emerging online adult entertainment industry built around streaming video!

Suddenly I had a purpose and little bit of 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 my former husband’s thing, it was my thing and my thing only because I was an expert at it and I earned it by putting literal skin in the game. I signed the company’s NDA and have counted my blessings ever since. My job probably saved my life and camgirls are still the reason I wake up every day because I love it and them!

---

Almost as soon as I landed my dream job, 9 months later, I fell ill with pancreatitis and almost died.

I spent three months in the ICU of three separate hospitals, in and out of comas with only a 30% chance of surviving, kidneys failing, dialysis, emergency bedside surgery, waking up disfigured, with a tracheotomy and no idea what happened, relearning how to walk after being in a hospital bed for so long….it was a whole ordeal that my internet audience followed on Facebook because my former husband was keeping everyone updated.

When I woke up after healing for a couple of months under sedation, someone from the internet bought me an iPad with a SIM card so I could go online to keep everyone updated from the third and final hospital, since hospitals didn’t just automagically 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 to change the dressing every day and finally surgery to put my belly back together again (massive ventral hernia).

I wrote about every detail on LiveJournal or Facebook, supported mostly by my former husband, my mom, and people I only knew from the internet. Because of this, 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 my former husband donations to help cover my missing wages and the added cost of hospital life.

---

The Hellacious Period:
2011-2015

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. Every time I had pancreatitis, my pancreas was damaging itself further, making me sicker and more prone to having pancreatitis again, 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 strangers passing by in cars who sometimes honked for no reason.

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 my former husband and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary.

---

The Price Of E-Fame If You’re Mentally Ill

---

End Of An Era

---

25 Years Of Textibitionism

---

2021-Present: The Pink Period

---

---

---

---

---

---

And that’s, more or less, the story of me. This version, anyway.

Peace out, Girl Scouts!
Sunny

May 21st, 2026

---