











| I’d be crying alone in bed, having some emotional breakdown or whatever, and I’d be all ‘well now is the time’ and I go to my Finsta and start spamming weird Lindsay Lohan memes or pictures of my bloodshot, sobbing eyes. I would post super revealing, emotional, ‘sad girl’ type stuff, like crying selfies, and also random memes with like super depressing captions. Like, a picture of Shrek or something captioned ‘I hope it all ends soon lol’. Then [I’d] just [leave] that up to everyone’s interpretation. ‘People only show you what they want you to see’ is super true in this case. Social media, especially when you want it to be your job or something, has to portray something profitable or follow-able. My mental illness, my depression, are neither of those things, so I have to hide it all. Filtering is necessary to be successful on social media. People don’t want to follow sad girls with real mental illness and crazy long depressive episodes, they wanna follow sad girls with smudgy eyeliner who tweet ‘ugh i hate my liiiife’ once in a while. So basically I just have to filter my whole entire existence, or else I’m not popular anymore. A lot of the time I wouldn’t read comments or check the likes or anything, I would just put it out there and be like ‘okay well now they know!!’ Then half the time I would wake up the next morning and have to archive like five pictures, because I just wasn’t in the right state of mind to be posting anything. It’s like this morning-after feeling, like if you were drunk and texted your ex… When I’m having an emotional breakdown I would use my Finsta like a tissue to cry into and then wake up the next day and be all ‘OH GOD’ and delete my whole life and just worry about who saw it, if my friends are worried about me, and especially if they’re talking about me among themselves. Personally I just want to give off a semi-stable vibe despite being extremely unstable. It was pretty sad that I relied on it. But without a therapist… I just needed SOME outlet, so my Finsta was all I had, I guess. When you’re always posting crying selfies and being publicly depressed, that might just mean you need a therapist, not a Finsta. Personally, I just needed a therapist. Now I have a therapist! I just had to force myself to make my Finsta public so that, before I post something, I’m like ‘ok the whole world is gonna see this’ and reconsider my actions. It’s just like a ‘more of me’ account now, which does not negatively impact my mental health like when it was private, which is great for me because my mental health is quite fragile. |











