Remembering Alex Rogahn

TW: substance abuse, self-harm, suicide.

I’ve been writing case studies chronologically, and am nearing completion on the earliest I intend to highlight: a project that I started in 2011, and earlier, an app icon from 2008. I was a teenager and kid respectively, and had dabbled in web development and visual design in the three to four years before that. Nostalgia’s on the mind.

My eighth grade school year was Winter 2008 through Spring 2009, and I was homeschooled for a year.^[1] I’d created a few websites and wanted to design icons and build apps, and while I had done what I could with the time available outside of school, homeschool was truly my unsupervised-child-online experience. After a rough two years beforehand at a small private school, it was a relief when my mother asked me if I didn’t want to go back for the third year. And while I’m unsure my parents^[2] knew what they were doing, it was a necessary respite to transition from an insular seven-kid-pecking-order to a 5A highschool. ^[3]

That year, I met Alex Rogahn — maybe via Twitter, DeviantArt^[4], or MacThemes — it doesn’t particularly matter. He was maybe a couple of years younger than me, and like me presented an awkward kid with oodles of time to learn skills: web development and Photoshop. Specifically, we were both creating sets of 32 pixel stock icons for OS X, inspired by Jonas Rask‘s Danish Royalty Free Icons.

The work was terrible, and I deleted it and my entire DeviantArt profile a few years later when I started receiving commercial interest and I didn’t want much online documenting my young age and earlier work.^[5] I’m checking with a few archivist friends, but it’s a low likelihood it still exists anywhere. That said, it was also highly educational. Alex and I shared PSDs back and forth and regularly video-chatted^[6] to discuss methods and application.

This is all preamble and context and waxing amounting to that today, when checking in on folks I remember having worked with in some capacity, I learned that in November 2018 — over six years ago — Alex committed suicide.^[7]

At the time, I had finished my undergraduate and was living in Belgium. Alex and I had already not spoken in years. I’d made a new Facebook account to distance from the Cambridge Analytica fallout discourse, added only those recently relevant to me or with whom I proactively kept up, and I missed Alex.

I remember that in addition to visual design and web development, he was a musician. I remember keeping in touch as we first aged into high school, and being surprised to hear him talking about his girlfriend moving in. I remember him talking about Asberger’s, anxiety, and depression. I remember him talking about hid coping, his vices, and I remember my eventual pulling away as the compensation became dangerous.

And of course we significantly fell out of touch over the years, though I thought I’d checked in on him more recently than over six years ago. He was a good friend at a unique year of my childhood, and were it possible, I’d thank him for that.

In the mix of graphic design we also spoke like people and I was unknowningly privileged and relieved to find a fellow kid who felt out of place. While I was a normatively misfit kid, he had more going on, but I — I can’t presume we and can no longer ask — felt a sense of recognition from him. Peerage and friendship.

As I later came into my politics and realized I wasn’t straight, I surrounded myself with mutually-validating friends. My local generation took much for granted regarding mental health. Of course the queer teens, the neurodivergent teens, the depressed teens, the kids suffering abuse at home, all engaged in these trappings: substance abuse, self harm, suicidal ideation. We also had each other, our drama, and our camaraderie.

There are so few of these people that I still know, and I hope that they’re all okay.