This is me, in all my 11-year-old glory. Or, as I prefer to think of it, this is me in a past life.

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When I was in sixth  grade, I was on a kids' version of the TV show Jeopardy! To answer all your questions right off the bat, I came in second and barely interacted with Alex Trebek.

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A year after my show aired in the summer of 2011, I moved to a new state and didn't know anyone. So I used my 30 minutes of game show fame to try to make myself stand out at my new middle school. It worked — in the sense that I did stand out. But it also became the main thing I was known for.

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So in 2016, five years after my original appearance, I made a small-time meme of my own. I'd recently discovered that people had opinions about my experience they'd posted on Twitter, including one that insinuated I clapped like a seal. So I found that moment and pounced.

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The Vine I created to take back my identity went what I thought of at the time as "viral" — about as viral as you can get when you're a high school sophomore with 150 followers and you post a very niche meme you made yourself.

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Two and a half more years passed, and I wrote this essay about my experience on the show and with creating my own meme. That essay was the jumping-off point for this project.

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Because of my experience with the Vine and my love of sports — which regularly produces some of the most enduring memes — I'm very interested in the intersection of memes and identity and the way people create themselves online.

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In the process of doing this project, I did a variety of writing experiments — some more related to game shows, and some about social media. I kept coming back to those themes of social media and identity. So I put together this final project peeling back the curtain on internet inside jokes.

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Take a look around! My project can be found on the "project" tab and if you want to read more on the origins of memes, check out the "learn more" tab to check out some of the sources I read.