what being on the internet cancels out
how dare anyone - including me - forget the richness of my experience
I woke up in the middle of the night and, against my will almost, decided instinctively to open Twitter because a friend sent me a Tweet. I began scrolling, as if possessed by an automated voice in my head going, “Seek what will hurt you.”
What hurts me is a million ghosts in my head suddenly get projected faces, names, thoughts, opinions and they are all on my timeline.
What I hear is, “We don’t give a flying fuck about what you have to say.” There are millions of people on Twitter, and yet most of them don’t want to hear my voice. They’re too busy liking other people’s Tweets, too busy monetizing other people’s brands, too busy paying attention to everyone but me.
The idea that from Mars, we are nothing but smaller than cellular specks was always fascinating to me. My insignificance feels humbling there.
But in my head, other people are their own moons in orbit, and I am a space rock that has no relevance. It’s absolute horse shit but I’m documenting how much it hurts. Suddenly, my “body dysmorphia” over how valuable my voice is rises up to choke me in these moments.
When I’m on the Internet by myself, suddenly I don’t matter anymore. Suddenly I don’t hear me anymore. I am so irrelevant that I feel I am falling, down a black hole.
I realized the antidote here was to completely lean into the feeling and scream scream scream at it, as opposed to curl up in a ball and fight the urge to figure out my own algorithm battles, how I could ride the river to more followers or more recognition or more engagement.
Fuck that shit.
But also fuck pretending like I don’t care, and that I’m not dying. Fuck being ashamed. May I just unbutton my shirt and show the public how much I’m bleeding out then.
But what do I want?
My friend Anansi recently reminded me I can pray to God for things. What I realized was, if I still believed in manifestation and mattering to the Lord, I’d ask him to take away my grief, not give me more followers.
This is a red herring. This just reminds me of the part of me I haven’t healed.
So right now, I’m healing her by putting the spotlight on her, that inner child that I’m always afraid to acknowledge is screaming. I hear you, baby. Let’s have a little chat.
Earlier, I wrote how, “it’s really stupid how much I’ve been struggling lately.”
I’ll write instead, “I am so ashamed about how much I’ve been struggling lately.” This feels humiliating. The ghosts have a great way of telling me that other people don’t feel this way. If they did, you would’ve found a Substack talking about this by now.
I told Jack Lin earlier that I don’t really understand people at their core, and I experience the world as two-dimensional sometimes, especially other people as bricks without real feelings.
Every day I wake up and shout internally, No. People ARE fucking like me. It’s absolute bullshit that I choose to focus on the fear they’re not because of how much I couldn’t speak my truth as a kid.
When I stopped hating Twitter and decided to use it to befriend people, concurrent with moving to New York, I also started realizing the illusion of other people’s voices mattering more than mine would come up to haunt me. I was always spoken over in elementary school, always asked why I wasn’t like the other kids, and my sensitive ass internalized it. The idea of never being enough became a weird source of erotic charge. It would dance before my vision, taunting me that I didn’t have what it takes.
It feels elementary to be this somatically affected by Internet popularity. I assume everyone else is over it because everyone else is possibly too embarrassed to chat about it so extensively. I don’t know. I do know that I’m embarrassed probably because I befriend people that have beat the struggle and found their own definition of value. I’m not really there yet. I’ve realized recently that for some, they started their journey on the Internet earlier.
As a millennial, I got a computer in my house when I was 8. As a kid, I got Online properly when I was a teenager. I’ve never been on 4chan, haven’t ever seen porn. I ignored Vine when it was a thing.
I’ve realized recently how lots of my close friends have educated me on How The Internet works because they were fascinated by and using it more earlier. To me, I was afraid of what I’d find. More proof of my insignificance?
I did have a Xanga, and a Live Journal. But back then, it was an Internet diary more interesting than writing in my journal. Back then, I didn’t feel like anyone online would get me more than the kids at school. I assumed everyone was just like that — playing a game I couldn’t win.
With Twitter, I refused to use it for years because the image that would burn in my head was one of insignificance. I never felt my voice was being implicitly compared to everyone else’s, because the feeling inside of me from childhood already felt muted by others’. I feel like no one wants to hear what I have to say, and honestly, a greater part of me thinks that I don’t have what it takes to make them hear me.
The Internet never enthralled me. I didn’t associate getting smarter about the big bad Web as what would save me from the suicidal thoughts of my youth.
I felt like I would open my mouth and try to shout into the void, but a hoarseness would seize my throat and I would implicitly feel my tongue lock up.
I wrote a piece on being smart over kind recently. But sometimes I’m guilty of a far more nuanced thing —I’d rather be Internet famous, weirdly, than exist as me, as if that would take away my pain.
Why is the validation I get from my friends not enough?
OK sorry. You probably came because you wanted to know the answer to the title’s question: What does being on the Internet cancel out?
The fact that I’m more Online now than I ever have been tells me a lot. I was not a very online kid, even though I was born in 1995, and I’m a minority in my friend circles.
What did I learn to prioritize instead?
I grew up on the West Coast, so I would walk the track every day at school during recess, when I had no one to play with because I was so weird.
After school, I’d walk that same track if I was waiting for my mom to pick me up.
This track would be a round circle, and trees and a grassy field in its center accented the experience. When you went around and around on this track, you’d be next to nature even on the comfort of man-made dwellings, and you’d have a chance to think about life, but have this familiarity of returning to where you started.
I think growing up in Oregon made me feel connected to forces outside of the humans who disappointed me, made me detached to what other people wanted from me over time, and humbled me that I am nothing compared to the force of what God is.
In elementary school, I learned that I could prioritize myself as a vessel of the Spirit, flowing through me daily, reminding me that love is the fucking answer when we are hurt and scared.
Often, I’d see an image of myself as an eviler version of me, a person who could bite into my mother’s skin with my words, punch a kid who pissed me off, throw sharp objects at my teachers, yell bloody murder. I’d watch my anger rise up and get ready to fight the world, as I felt so impotent at not mattering.
I took that with me as I continued my offline adventures. I told myself it was okay to feel that way – but that there was more out there, if God could lead me out of Egypt where I felt like a fucking monster.
Instead, I’d realize, I didn’t have to be one.
I lived in North Dakota as a 20 year old instead of getting a fancy New York internship. I spent my weekends driving around Grand Forks again, looking at the canola farms and the buffalo grazing tenderly around the perimeter of the town, and I realized this is who I really am. If I’m to be insignificant, let it be amongst the natural forces of the world, not among the people forcing themselves to compete with me to matter.
When I am on the Internet for too long, I forget how good it is to walk arm in arm with my best friend as we skip through the night after stealing a seltzer glass out of a bar and eating $4 sushi in LA and admiring how full of freedom she is, like me. I forget how it felt to bob my head to the sounds of jazz covers from my childhood, eating some yummy ube ice cream with a peaceful crowd excited to partake in someone’s immense musical talent. I forget how it felt to ride the bus with my other best friend into the night, letting our simultaneous sadness linger and mingle together. I forget how it felt to ride the subway and smile at the friend who insisted on reading my Asian girl Substack and tell me if no one else liked it, she would like it. I forget how it felt to hold a new friend’s hand as we hugged goodbye beneath a street lamp in Japantown SF after I felt curious about myself again, with the yearning to know him emanating off of me.
What do I want to focus on?
What do I want to matter?
Why am I typing this at 2:30am?
I can completely dominate that fear in my head, that fear that my experience doesn’t matter because a million parallel stars are exploding in timelines and joys and grief and wonder in other people’s universes.
I can demonstrate to my younger self, that we’re not going to roll over and tell ourselves this doesn’t matter.
We’re going to squeeze our eyes shut and stare at the images of what is real. What you can taste, what you can smell, what you can touch, what impact I have on the people who love me the most.
When I die, I’m going to remember how the Internet didn’t matter, but who I loved did.
We’re not going to hide anymore and just complain to our Twitter private Circle.
We’re not going to tell ourselves yes, other people do go through this.
Because fuck, it’s STILL about other people. It’s not really about ME. I’m afraid I’m making it about me, when it is inevitably about me.
Don’t I get a say in what’s real to me?
Only I can be me.
And what it means to be me is to emphasize the richness of my experience.
Those number counts don’t matter, if you displace them with how many fucking interesting people there are in this world to love and hold and connect with.
60,000 followers isn’t real connection.
God is connection. My older self, who I prayed to before I wrote this, is connection.
She told me that when all of this shit doesn’t matter anymore, I will matter to me. I will always matter to me, because it’s always been me.
And when I’m crying and sad and feel abandoned and adrift on the Internet, the person I can turn to to comfort me, is me.
I am here for me. What being on the Internet shouldn’t cancel out is, I exist for me.
I’m going back to sleep now. I can still taste the ice cream from tonight on my tongue. That’s a sign I’m alive and doing well.
Fuck any other psychodrama I have going on.
Wow. This was powerful.