2020 was a dark time. I don’t need to tell you that, but I will anyway. It was the year I succumbed to Tik Tok, that infernal digital casino, a platform that took me three years to wean off. My friend circle shrunk to its immediate limits, deep dark relationships surviving while acquaintances jumped ship. I lost my time. I lost my mind, holed up in my parents’ basement, realizing that social distancing wasn’t a foreign concept at all, that it actually structured my youth. No parties? No gatherings? No mirth? High school me had emerged again, awakened from her slumber to fuck up her retinas even more with screen time.
I latched onto a particular lurking habit during this period, but it was not one of my usual avenues for stalking. Snapchat bored me, and I had exhausted every Instagram profile I could find from my peers. And this was a feat. I spent many hours excavating their pages, examining the aestheticized minutiae of their daily lives. Celebrities held no interest for me - their pictures were tableau vivants, flawless and unattainable. I accepted their sublimity without a care. No, what I was obsessed with was the accessible means towards perfection. The girls at my college with the glossy hair, amazing lighting, hordes of friends, a cute hockey player boyfriend to show off at all the darties. I wanted it all, it was in my reach, and I would never grasp it. Too solipsistic1 in my shyness and self-presentation. Couldn’t muster the courage to just talk to people I was interested in. So I decided to get to know them in a different way. A safer way. A worse way. I found another entrance into their lives through the hallowed halls of VSCO.
VSCO is the Platonic version of Instagram, or at least what Instagram could've been had it renounced the path of the influencer. It is photo-sharing at its hyper-curated; filters are encouraged, and photo dumps previously unseen “on main” are the norm. And luckily for me, everyone who had one usually put it in their Instagram bio, so a deeper rabbit hole was only one click away. I was hooked from the moment I found it, trawling through pictures upon pictures of people I knew by face, people I’d never spoken to and probably never will. The accounts blended together in terms of content: study abroad locations, New England summer shots, those darties, fairy lights, neon signs, a cloud or two. Not too much variation, but just enough to keep me satisfied, to know I was peering into worlds away from my own.
That all came crashing down one day. There was a girl I had come across, one I didn’t really care about. Not in a negative sense. I’m sure she’s lovely. She simply didn’t feature the kind of person I was hungry for, like, to give a totally reasonable and not unhinged example, my longstanding campus crush.2 Just happened to be my latest victim in voyeurism at that time. So I’m sure she suffered all too greatly when I accidentally reposted her picture onto my feed.
If you know what this means, you’ll know it’s weird with a capital W-E-I-R-D. If you don’t, god bless your innocent soul. Reposting a picture on VSCO was not a casual like gone awry or a retweet to back track. Reposting was essentially the act of posting the picture yourself. Like you are in it. Or connected to it. A participant in its inception, not a mere witness. Taking ownership where you have none. To give an Instagram equivalent, it would be like downloading a picture of the person you’re lurking on and then reuploading that picture onto your main feed.3 Like a nutcase. Needless to say, I was mortified. Amongst my own detritus of landscapes and portraits were four smiling blonde women, none of whom I had met, let alone were friends with. And to top it off, I couldn’t undo my damage. As much as I tried, VSCO refused to let me delete what I had just done. Like it was basking in the supernova faux pas I had just committed.
My sinful act drove me to confession. I texted my actual friend T, another VSCO-lover who used the app for its intended purpose of posting cute pics. She thought it was funny. But it’s interesting to look back now and see how desperate I was for her consolation. I was distressed that I was that much of an idiot. T was the manifestation of whatever deity I needed to supplicate so I could assuage my guilt. It worked.
For a while. I deleted the app after I told her what happened, but that didn’t stop its real-life manifestation of cringe. A few months later, I was in my college’s library, studying hard as there was not much else to do. I think it was finals season. Must’ve been finals season, because the library was packed, a rare feat during pandemic time. So it was wild when I caught two blonde girls staring at me, look back at each other, and laugh conspiratorially. Mean girls in a DCOM, or a YA Netflix original. But what was the joke? Why was it me? It took too long to recognize that the wavy-haired one was the girl I had reposted.
It’s one thing to do something embarrassing online. It’s a whole other ballgame when that embarrassment turns into a tangible humiliation. Social media antics became a telepathic flogging - the person I lurked on knew what I did and wanted me to be ashamed of it. My face burned as I turned back to write my essay. I deserved every second of it.
What was this all for? Please let me know. Genuinely asking. Offer your thoughts. I now exist as a freak in that girl’s life just so I could get that sweet sweet hit of nosiness. And I don’t even care about her allegedly! A pitstop on my race to digital omniscience. I’d become so obsessed with only reading into online personas that I had lost the ability to see people as I was meant to: alive, fleshed-out, three-dimensional.
But to publicly renounce nosiness would be fraudulent on my part. I am messy, not a hypocrite. I love hoarding information on others as much as the next person. Yet eavesdropping should be ephemeral, not recorded for posterity. Gossip is to be whispered, analyzed, extracted from social situations you experience with all five senses. You can control your urges if you respect that it is temporal and subject to the whims of memory. Online lurking is too powerful. Too much at stake. I still succumb to it,4 even in the wake of this disaster, years after I deactivated every platform that granted me easy access to its lurid temptations. I want to escape the panopticon, the one I have built for myself, a single watch guard observing my prisoners. But I just don’t think I can. Shame, with all of its strength in misery, cannot beat down this tidal wave of entitlement that I have, an entitlement to the digital footprints of people who are cooler, hotter, better than me. I’m sure I’ll embarrass myself again in no time.
What I’m Reading (no watching because I’ve been traveling so much for work I haven’t had the time!)
Detranstion, Baby by Torrey Peters
Wowwwwwwwwwwwwwww wow wow wow wow wow. Just finished it yesterday and am just. ¿¿¿¿¿¿?????????? What an experience. I have so many mixed emotions coming out from this book, especially as I read Andrea Long Chu’s Freedom of Sex article in New York Magazine before I started it. Will definitely need to re-read in the future, but highly recommend.
Conversations by Friends by Sally Rooney
Finally getting around to my second Sally Rooney and I’m enjoying it more than Normal People! Having a hard time putting it down, always a good sign. Rooney’s clinical, clipped writing style works a lot better with these characters than with Connell and Marianne (Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar–Jones brought their complex, heartbreaking emotions to life and engaged me wayyyyyyy more than their literary counterparts. But I am also in love with Paul Mescal so who knows lol maybe I’m biased). ANYWAY, I do think Rooney haters should give this book a try. Good stuff.
cannot think of this word without conjuring those terrible malcolm and marie monologues, jesus christ
the amount of brainspace i have devoted to this boy who has probably never given me a second thought in his life..........criminal
I mean yeah like less steps involved on VSCO because you just hold and release to repost, but visually it looks like you've uploaded someone else’s picture onto your account. horrifying!
new work crushes means new profiles to obsess over 🫣
Ohmygosh I’m so sorry that happened but at least you’re an extremely talented writer who gave us a compelling and visceral retelling! I’ve had some social media embarrassments for sure and other humiliations that I assumed would haunt me forever. If it’s worth anything, I really do believe time will make this feel like almost nothing someday. 🙏🏻