Fuck social media.
Fuck modern society.
How many of you genuinely care? Or are you all just watching hoping to see a train wreck bigger than your own?
Well watch away, my goal for the night is to overdose and end up in the river. Maybe I’ll livestream it for everyone’s entertainment.
This is the post that started my whole journey through addiction recovery. I had been struggling with cravings and substance abuse again, and I just couldn’t handle it anymore. I didn’t like to put my struggles out there online, I felt like they were personal, but moreover, I felt like I would be judged. Revealing anything truly dark on my facebook was something that I had never done before, so this really concerned people. My therapist was called, and I ended up being dragged to an emergency appointment by my mother. This is when I finally snapped and told the truth, the secret I had been holding in for nearly a decade, I was a drug addict. I don’t know how I kept it a secret that long, how anyone believed my lies, how nobody saw it on my face and body.
At this point, I had been “sober” for about a year and a half. I had been sober off of alcohol and put down the “street drugs,” but I was still using and abusing substances daily but was still too much of an addict to see this. I had had a “relapse” about a month prior to all this (that story is a post of its own), and it really screwed up my head. I had become agitated and paranoid. The vexing idiosyncrasies of modern life and social interaction were getting to me. It was frustrating to me that after a public tragedy like a celebrity death, everyone makes posts online like “if you ever need help, knock on my door and I’ll have a pot of coffee” – but then when you simply text them it turns into “that sounds like your problem” – and don’t you dare call them, then they’re being put on the spot and you’re a monster for putting someone in a situation like that.
In modern life, all of our words, feelings, thoughts, and experiences, are run through the filter of the internet and then spewed onto a social media feed. Everything needs to be big; you won’t get attention unless it’s something extravagant. A good day can be polished up and fudged a little to sound like “the most wonderful day ever!” A really bad day can be darkened with a bit of mystery and melodrama to keep people on their toes and keep them interested, but really, even if we don’t notice it, a lot of the time we’re just giving into the melodrama because of morbid curiosity. A small victory won’t receive praise; a little funk won’t keep people texting. This need to exude extravagance goes into all areas of our lives, how we portray our jobs, relationships, and lifestyle is all curated for a social media feed. So many people think that how they are portrayed online is who they are, this character they created overcomes them and pressures them to live up to their own creation. People will miss friend’s birthday parties because they had to go to a VIP club night because it’s so Instagramable, people will miss payments on their cable bill to buy a Gucci belt because they need to portray a life of exorbitance. They don’t share how they listened to their friend cry on the phone the next day for missing her party; you won’t hear about how the man with the Armani suit has terrible credit because his job barely pays him $15/hour.
This is what we’ve become; we don’t enjoy moments, we capture them on our phones in hopes we’ll impress others. We don’t truly connect with people because so much of our interaction is online where we created this persona, we’re not talking to real and raw people, we’re talking through polished filters. We’re too scared of coming up short and not living up to our self-made character to have time for the real shit in life. Sometimes our fears and feelings of inadequacy make us search social media for someone having a day worse than ours, some people keep that one person whose life is a mess on their friends list just to watch the fireworks so they can feel better about their own shortcomings. In most cases, I don’t think this makes you a bad person, trying to live up to your online persona is exhausting and maybe that “trainwreck” friend is giving you something real, maybe it makes you feel more comfortable with the fact that real life doesn’t come with a filter pack and some days you feel like a mess too.
The part of my breakdown where I mention everyone looking for a show was referring to my work. Sometimes I don’t feel like a person, because in a way, I’m not. I know the person I portray is a persona, I know that character is merely an exaggerated version of myself, I know that I chose to play this part, I know it’s a brand. It’s exhausting to be a “brand” because people expect this show out of you 24/7. Sometimes I feel like that’s all I’m good for, constant entertainment, and when you’re in that position people forget there’s a regular and flawed human under all that makeup and great lighting, and sometimes I, myself forget. Sometimes I forget when the lights go off I’m someone else, I’m not expected to perform anymore, but I felt like I had to (I feel like the eccentricities of my work deserve a post of their own, but I’m trying to describe what I was feeling here.) I started to feel like a machine, I had lost all work/life balance and felt like that’s all anyone expected out of me. I felt like to reveal the fact that I was an addict, mentally ill, and not doing ok, would only bring the morbidly curious people who only see me as a source of entertainment (who at the time, I felt was everybody.) They might give me hollow words of support, but how many people would genuinely care? Were they just looking for a little drama because they finished their Netflix show? Would they only come to my aid to keep me around as nothing but a performer? This is how I felt, and it was terrible to be in that headspace of thinking everyone just wants something out of me and doesn’t care about the person inside. They don’t know the person inside.
I could be wrong, but I feel like maybe even people who aren’t entertainers can relate in some way. So many of you put up this facade on social media and feel like that is who you are, that is your identity. Keeping it up so nobody sees that soft, real, yucky, and vulnerable part of you must feel like a 24/7 performance.
Your online presence isn’t your identity; it’s nothing but a bunch of pixels and code.
