surprise surprise
it's social media commentary time
this week’s Thought (singular)
no thoughts, just the excitement before seeing friends that you haven’t met in years
hi
there’s something to be said for curating social media feeds to better reflect the content that you want to see, rather than what you’re bombarded with regardless. in fact, there are quite a few things to say, as i’m about to demonstrate.
i used to follow a bunch of those hyper-specific sad-meme pages. they were filled with nihilistic shitposts, cloaked in internet-speak to seem casually depressing, very obviously run by people who desperately need therapy. i related to them. i found them amusing, and i understood the vibe they were going for. thrived in it, maybe. for a while, it felt like i was living the same life as a bunch of strangers, and that all my experiences, if not universal, weren’t singular. i got used to seeing the quick, 280-word condensations of hyper-specific anxiety attack episodes. i came to anticipate and mirror the blasé attitude with which isolation and depression were addressed. i even started looking at my own problems through a similar lens - make a witty one-liner about a traumatising event and brush it under the carpet.
spoiler alert - this isn’t healthy.
to clarify, i completely understand that this could be a coping mechanism for people. i get that there is comfort and security in nonchalance. and it truly was fun for a couple of months, knowing that somebody else was throwing peace signs at their reflection after having a breakdown. but slowly, this stopped becoming funny and started becoming a bit concerning.
day after day, i’d open an app on my phone, i’d see ten, meme-coded words about suicidal ideation, and then i’d go back to my life like that’s normal. a mini-ouroboros of feeling bad, reading that others are also feeling bad, and doubling down on feeling bad. it went from being glad that i’m not alone to repeatedly ingesting the fact that others were unhappy, constantly reiterating what i was going through.
the picking-and-choosing of what i wanted to see on my phone became crucial. constantly consuming depression memes, however snappy and relatable they were, had an adverse affect on my psyche. i didn’t sign up to empathise with quite so many people about quite so many issues. i wanted to go back to scrolling through cat videos, wholesome memes, and updates about 40k-word fanfiction.
i unfollowed them. i felt better.
i like seeing pictures of undecipherable, sometimes high-handed, modern art. i find painting videos calming. i saw a dog and a lion being best friends, and a cute meme about kids being carried to bed by their fathers after falling asleep on the couch. something about butterfly tops and summer drinks, live news bloopers and book reviews for terrible novels. it’s lighter, less hostile, more friendly. easier.
this isn’t a fix for how awful the world might be, and it isn’t a substitute for professional help. but it minimises the frequency of consuming sadness, drawing attention to sadness, throwing a spotlight on sadness, knowing the self through the other - where the other here is the internet-at-large’s sadness.
tl;dr: you gotta do what you gotta do.
ps: i only realised all this after watching this TEDx Talk, called Casually Suicidal. viewer discretion is advised.
English Recitation Competition
The Aunty Poem (Mi Privilege Es Su Privilege), Mohja Kahf
I am your aunty for life Here are clean sheets, and my spare key
My house is mine: the choice of menu, the radio and television, the unpolished floors, the rumpled sheets.
Strange as the Rules of Grammar, Terrance Hayes
Between being grounded & being buried between being anchored & sinking You know how they say at the forked tongue of the crossroads & at the crooked foot of the foothills nothing you haven’t already heard Strange as the first wound you ever received The scar is so old others must tell you how it was made
Middle School Book Review
Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough
semi-biographical retelling of a 17th century italian painter, and passionately feminist right to its incredibly well-written core. one of those books that make you go feral at the fact that you are a woman. every page is fueled by rage, sadness, and pride.
The Good Side of the Internet
In February 1820, on learning that his good friend Lady Georgiana Morpeth was suffering from a bout of depression, noted English essayist and clergyman Sydney Smith sent her a precious letter filled with sound advice, to be followed in an effort to overcome “low spirits.” Smith presented his wise words in the form of a list.
A Plane of Monkeys, a Pandemic, and a Botched Deal: Inside the Science Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of (investigative journalism)
On May 15, 2020, a US-bound cargo plane was scheduled to depart Mauritius, an island about the size of Maui that’s just east of Madagascar. There were four key things I knew about the flight:
It involved the transportation of monkeys.
The monkeys were intended for Covid research.
The cost—to cover the fuel, crew, insurance, and other expenses—totaled nearly half a million dollars.
The public was never supposed to find out about it.
In a backward sort of way, the only reason I can tell you anything about the flight is because it never happened.
One Woman’s Wholesome Mission to Get Naked Outside
After a lifetime of prudishness, our writer tries to become one of those people who bares it all in the great outdoors
Kate Price remembers something terrible (investigative journalism; disturbing, heed content warnings - sexual abuse of children)
An authority on child sex trafficking, she spent decades trying to understand whether the unthinkable happened to her, too.
Things hated and loved by Marion Milner
Born in London in 1900, Marion Milner was a renowned psychoanalyst, educationalist and artist known to many as Joanna Field, the pseudonym she used as an author. In 1934, A Life of One’s Own was published—the culmination of a years-long journey during which she had attempted to discover what made her happy. In that book, amongst the many diary entries and philosophical ruminations, can be found a list she had discovered in her papers, written some time before this journey began, of things she had at one point hated and loved.
this week’s Song
(bonus, in relation to this song: the most satisfying dance video i have ever seen)
thank you for reading, and see you next week <3