spiral

the end of my finsta came abruptly and unceremoniously on a night i got too high in college. it started simply enough, with an aching for the past and a will to visit the girl i’d grown estranged from since leaving my hometown. i took a deep dive into the archives, back to the inception of the account i’d used as a pseudo-diary since fourteen. i met the girl i thought i missed. and she was not doing well.

i was a spiral inside of a spiral — scrolling, horrified, through pages of teenaged me posting near-nudes and memes with captions like “ghosted again lol” and “my mom is having another manic episode #quirky.”

i was omniscient, i was god, looking down on my wayward child traumaposting into the void and pleading her to come back into the light. but the damage had already been done.

in an effort of self-preservation, i deleted the account to maintain my digital footprint and to stop my own meta-spiral from going any further. i shut my phone off and stared into my popcorn ceiling and waited for the stucco to morph into patterns.

a spiral is intoxicating. it’s hard to miss when you see it, and even harder to see when you’re in it. sometimes people know when they’re going down the drain, but that’s not really the type of breakdown that interests me. what truly, shamefully, captures me is a suffering person, voracious for an audience, posting every step into the darkness without a shred of self-awareness about any of it.

just last night i had to pull myself out from under a thread of 132 TikTok comments in which a micro-influencer was fighting the good fight against an internet troll. it was riveting — her valiant attempts at nonchalance absolutely demolished by commenting 12 separate times that she “didn’t care what you thought,” the ability of the troll to keep stoking the fire without ever once using explicatives, and the sheer length of the exchange, prompting images of chipping gel nails tapping ferociously at a screen.

as a voyeur to the spiral, you’re in on the joke. you have access to information that the spiraling person doesn’t have — you see the disconnect between how they believe they’re coming across and how they actually are. you see the panic living, breathing, and escaping from someone’s body without them admitting to themselves that it was ever there. you get to pat yourself on the back for noticing it. you get to delude yourself into thinking that you’re far too cerebral for this to ever be you.

and of course it will be you! it will be all of us! it was me at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, documenting my many psychic tragedies to an audience of classmates who were already at no loss of reasons to find me insufferable. it’s me now and today, posting a photo of my face on instagram so i can scroll through the comments and affirm “i’m pretty i’m pretty i’m pretty and people think that. this is what people think and they are saying it to me.” there is a reason that the venn diagram between buddhist monks and active social media users does not intersect. every post is a cry for help.

what i needed as a teenager was not a platform for my neuroses. i thought that casting a lasso into the ether would tether me to some eternal truth — that one day there would be enough people paying attention to me for me to feel like i was someone worth paying attention to. and isn’t that the most humiliating part of it all? the requests we all make every single day, however garish or subtle, to be seen. the knife we twist into other people when we know that’s what they’re doing, and they don’t yet. the smugness of being on the other side.

#cringe