two weeks

just hit a fortnight off social media. what's new? the world keeps spinning.

( I should preface this by saying in these two weeks I have logged into Instagram four times on my computer, and I have reactivated my writing account, in which I follow no one I know and only post about my writing. This may be cheating, but as long as I don’t have the app and am not scrolling I think I am in the clear. )

In the past two weeks, I have logged into Instagram four times. Once about a minute ago, others spread throughout the weeks. Whenever I log in, wherever I am, I see the exact face I am looking to avoid, no scrolling needed, it was the first face I saw, on the first post I saw, four separate times, four separate posts. My world, even if only for a minute, stopped spinning, and it was a slap in the face to realise his did not, and never would. This was enough of a sign for me. And so I had a friend from home log into Instagram, change my passcode, and I am moving on with it. Not really, but you all knew that. You’re reading this because I am a writer, truthfully a rewriter, an overthinker, a mourner, someone who opens her heart far too liberally. And yet the world needs more love. The world does need girls like me with big hearts and thin skin.

Fourteen days off of social media, and my life has not changed that much. It is exam season, here on the coast of Fife, so time not spent revising is spent staring at the ceiling in silent, anxious contemplation. But if I had social media, I would be staring silently and anxiously at my phone. I am anxious writing this. I will be anxious to post this. I will be anxious sleeping, and waking because that is the place I am at in my life. I have not had enough therapy to think my emotions through enough to know the answer to this question, but I will pose it anyway. Why, whenever I trust a man, and he betrays me (which is not always the case), do I revert to my 16-year-old self? Why has this three-week situationship held so much power over me? In a couple of weeks I’ll get back to you all, but the keywords seem to be: shame, perception, intelligence, opening, truth.

In these two weeks I have begun reading for pleasure, slowly; reading Harold Bloom’s Invention of the Human might be a cheat because I know I will love the content, but it’s a big book suitable for my big heart.

I do miss Instagram, in a self-hating way. I miss being able to posture and having anxiety about not posturing well enough, I miss feeling gutted when I see people I thought were my close friends choose someone else (a man) over me. I miss the growing decay that started in me one Thursday bubbling up. Because when I had this decay, this brand of Insta-xiety, I didn’t have to focus on what I was really feeling: shame, acute sadness, and rage. As you probably guessed, my dear reader, I am being a bit facetious. But only a bit.

This isn’t the essay to dive into those three huge emotions I just mentioned. This isn’t even an essay, it’s the first of many long-form explorations of me always getting the short end of the stick. I hate that the world keeps spinning. I hate to feel unnoticed; I hate that I feel the only way to be noticed is to pimp myself out to people who have hurt me, in front of or behind my back. I hate that the world keeps on spinning. I hate to feel left out, going back to the big three (shame, acute sadness, rage), I hate to feel that one of my best friends is someone who callously broke my heart at the age of sixteen, because what does that say about me? Are my emotions so inconsequential that even I, myself, know it deep down? When will someone take me seriously? These are some of the questions that bounce around my head that would have bounced around my finsta. But they reverb in my brain: I love the boy who broke my heart at 16, he loves me, I love to love and to grow and to change and to watch others love and grow and change.

They also bounce around my substack. I call it the stack. I don’t talk about it too much, because I’m about one degree from name-dropping, and a lot of people lack critical thinking skills; if they read my writing they would not see what it was about. They would not see my pain as growth, but rather an attack. It’s a personal thing, my private substack, something I share with my closest friends and their parents, and my favourite high school teachers.

Because substack has become the primary replacement for social media. It has become a place to pose, a place to show a version of myself. But this version is a version of me I feel aligns with the version of me in the mirror, the selfie camera, the reflection of my black laptop screen. Getting off social media, has, for the time being, unblocked my writer’s block; it is because I have not already shared so much of myself I feel embarrassed to share more. I feel that sharing sometimes deeply personal parts of yourself on a blog is something most teenage girls are missing out on. So, teenage girls, boys, people, not teenage women, men, and people, I encourage you all to write. Liberally. Obsessively. Hauntingly. And maybe join me in posting. If you are ever worried about getting vulnerable, (and this helped me) realise that the people reading your substack, your niche blog, your long-form content, love you. And they will continue to love you

Because everyone wants to be seen. Everyone wants to feel like their world’s rotation has an effect on others; through posting this long-form exploration, laying myself out on a clothesline more and more with each susbtack post, I am screaming I’M HERE, I’M RIGHT HERE, I’M SMART AND FUNNY AND I LOVE TO LOVE! WHY IS THAT NEVER ENOUGH? And sometimes it feels like my friends on substack are calling back with their posts, in a way an Instagram post could never. So I think I will, for a long time, stay off social media, if only to reaffirm to myself who is listening; even if I am the only one listening, that is enough.

Lots of love. Desdemona