oversharing? have you considered not overscaring the hoes
"soft villain era"
the boomerang is a wild weapon because if it works, you gotta go get it, and if it doesn’t, it’s gonna go get you
“in the words of maya angelou, draw four nigga”
“alright y’all can prank me but you better be ethically mischievous”
i underthought once, big miss steak
there’s a thin ass space between “extraordinary” and “extra ordinary”
i keep calling writing loosies “stackin’” and i gotta chill before i get jumped
just because you’re in the mix, don’t mean you a necessary ingredient — you might be the raisin in the potato salad
taylor swift new album went double tapioca in my headphones,
flag on the play — unnecessary glazing
i’m so mad i wasn’t online for the time that we all learned that nancy reagan was giving everybody the wild yoppington; trickle down toponomics fr
born to “fuck outta here with that,” doomed to “damn that’s crazy”
continuing the series from the last post, today imma try to unpack some more mental health phenomena i’m trying to make sense of the online mental health clusterfuckery
the last one was about not knowing what anyone is talking about anymore…this one—
we should all know less about each other
is there such a thing as overknowing yourself? overknowing each other? will we ever go back to keeping that to ourselves?
we’ve normalized the overshare, the yap and go, prattle and skedaddle, take a gamble, decide to ramble, you get it. it’s to the point that if you’re not sharing some shit better left in therapy or the group chat (not whatsapp tho, the aunties…the aunties…), you look like a maniac.
like yes, the body keeps score but do we have to watch your game?
THINGS I LIKE ABOUT OVERSHARING:
gen z’s so funny — i don’t know if it’s the decline of man, the pandemic messing with their social lives, the nihilism, or the fact that they been online their whole life, they know how to capture mess and irreverence way better than millennials
it feels so open to be messy — in a world where everything feels like scripted programming we have to perform or we lose everything, putting it all out there is a form of release
social media is “the me me me machine” where everything looks like a rohrshach test — piece of news? make it about you. celebrity tea? make it about you. someone else’s break up? me me me. an apartheid state in gaza? do your part, make it about you but tastefully (because it is and it isn’t about you. some shit that’s not about you? make it about you. this is not what i’m genuinely mad at — everyone does it, me included.
we’ve been conditioned to make literally everything about ourselves over the past decade online and this, coupled with needing to feed the algorithmic beast with constant content, has deluded countless people into believing that the most minute details about our lives are necessary for public consumption (me included, i won’t let y’all take the piss alone for my past transgressions).
there is a strong argument for transparency and access to information to better connect with people and create more inclusive spaces. but the mental/emotional hard drive only has so much space. push comes to shove? that folder labeled “why the fuck do i know this about you” is going straight in the bin.
*stephen a. smith voice* “i’m here to tell you right now…that we don’t care.”
i don’t mean this callously – okay, maybe a little bit. but there are a lot of people going through a lot and we’ve all seen the extremely online people in our community overshare like crazy. my good bitch, I am not tuning in to your live to watch you crash out with limited commercial interruption like it’s hancock on fx.
i don’t think i’m chatting crazy when i say some people be draaaaaaaaaagging it. take a sec, i bet you thought of one just now. oversharing might be here to stay but the assumption that just by being alive, others owe you respect, viewership, and to buy from the etsy shop, that’s gotta die in a ditch on the side of the road.
i’m also not saying that people should come prepackaged with all of their acceptable traumas in a box to the left (no beyoncé), ready to conform to social normalcy. there are so many people left behind by this headass colonial performance of fitting in online. there needs to be a balance and i genuinely fear that some people do not have proper community when i seem them divulge some information recklessly.
i’ve been that person too, i’ve made that mistake. reacting. taking it to the tweets. but that mistake taught me who really had my back and knew me, who needed to fall to the wayside, and over time what i needed to build deeper more emotionally honest relationships. ones where i don’t need to perform or be on all the time.
if a tree heals in the woods and it gets low engagement, did it really happen?
i’m a yapaholic, yaptain phillips, yapov smirnoff, yappington bear, yappy doo but you gotta find the right frequency to yap at and even the most olympic level yapper gotta take a break — this ain’t 24 hour news and no one is watching any news 24 hours a day.
it feels like a lot of people are genuinely growing and changing and wow, the way i fucking love that for them. but, by my approximation, some people feel like they are performing their healing journey to a degree that feels exhibitionist at best, cringe at worst. it gives “y’all ain’t healed like me” to which i posit “if you were healed, would you be posting this?”
the culprit (imo) is metrics commanding our entire existence — likes, views, shares, retweets, comments, followers. we spend a lot of our time optimizing our lives — how we dress, how we consume, how we look, and how we are looked at, how we’re consumed, and how others think we dress. i’m not the first nor the last to describe the comparison matrix that social media can create (at best, aspirational, at worst, ingrid goes west) but the numbers…the damn numbers.
i had some videos about racism go “viral” in 2017 and it made people treat me differently. famously, this dude i used to know called me “16 million views” all the time and i fucking hated it; i literally saw my value go up in the eyes of people who wanted on board the mamoudou express, next stop mediocrity township.
it felt gross because while i was happy i had eyes on something i worked hard on (got me my manager!), my personal life felt horrible with family stuff, online death threats, resurfacing feelings (read the backcatalog for context). but those “look on the bright side” mfs kept seeing followers go up and put me on this weird pedestal i never wanted to be a part of. but the attention and retention of an audience was all some people saw.
those numbers of likes, followers, engagements, trends, blue check or no blue check, etc have defacto impacts on how people’s attention is captured and the popularity of, well, us. life has become the scene at the end of the social network where mark zuckerberg is refreshing his facebook page to see if ol’ girl is friending him back. but with everything.
professionally, personally, socially, romantically we’re all zuckin’ these days; constantly scrolling, looking back to see if our application was viewed, why our situationship from 2018 stopped watching our stories, how many times our video was watched, who left the questionable emoji in the comments, why two celebrities don’t follow each other anymore — an endless stream of microinteractions that we treat as macrointeractions because they can feel just as hefty even though they ain’t. who hasn’t posted something so one (1) person could see it? indirect as a mf, but a super relatable, human one-foot-in, one-foot-out behavior.
social media cultivates this odd voyeuristic relationship between us and our community because we are more looked at than seen and the latter feels better, more warm, closer to organic. i’ve seen people crash out crazy online and be like “someone should check in on them” and realize maybe the reason no one is is because they don’t have a real person to check them or check in on them.
in the endless carousel of social, we’ve adopted things like muting, blocking, ignoring certain words, etc to curate our experience — digital boundaries are healthy, believe me I took almost four years off. but online isn’t real life (duh) and the artificiality of where we spend most of our connective energy has more caught up to us. maybe online is better because we can curate that but real life is scary because blocks don’t work in real life, you can’t physically mute anyone, and them slurs find you in the wild, i’ll tell you what.
rather than deal with reality offline, it’s more comfortable to handle it online, from the comfort of your couch (or more likely toilet), where you can curate your response — “the jerk store called, they’re running out of you” energy. the dopamine rush of getting engagement on a well-crafted diss, meme, joke, takedown, etc…nothing like it, crack.exe. but it created a sort of addiction to external validation and general unseriousness towards real crises that i don’t know if we’ll ever know the effects of for a while.
someone saying “i’m healed” about the same thing 40x in an IG story makes me believe that a person either a) isn’t, b) don’t have people in their life they don’t have to perform around, or c) has some deep need to hold on to this moment to mine whatever attention/validation comes with it. i’m not knocking it, i’m clocking it.
if you take everyone with a grain of salt, you will literally die of salt poisoning and won’t be alive to enjoy the sympathy engagement
piggybacking off of my last post: if everyone is a victim, then everyone is a perpetrator. so why does it feel like there can only be one? everything seems so binary that only those two words seem to encapsulate what happens in any given conflict. in a world full of hyperbole, minimizing, stunted emotional growth, forced emotional maturity, shame, and blame it’s hard to know who’s who. a lot of people wait til the dust settles and go with whoever was nicer/has the juice at the moment but as it stands: somebody has to win and someone else has to lose. but who to believe…?
“perpetrators” often get blindly handed to anyone with more structural power in the situation — add up all the marginalizations of each and whoever has more, multiply by gender, carry the racism and boom, we got him (it’s normally him, be real). truth is it’s not that simple. that colonial ass arithmetic leaves a lot of space for people to get left behind, for abuse and harm to be championed and for victims to be left high and dry due to that math.
“victimhood” is just as tricky to define. one person’s “i’m a victim” is another person’s “pussy, that ain’t shit” and well, that’s not very easy to navigate, now is it? add some gendered, racial, queer, cultural, class-based analysis, get yourself a nice little “who’s allowed to hurt today” gumbo.
we’re living in a world of exposed nerves, people generally at their limit, and trying to navigate these sensitive subjects and stories from all across a trauma spectrum can be exhausting on top of our own shit so…why not just click through it? it sucks but like…i got my own shit you know? and anyway “they ain’t been through what i been through…”
to me, we’ve all been through something and i feel like we’re spending too much time individually “i’m spartacus-ing” and not enough time taking down what’s holding us back collectively. being a victim socially defined and individually defined and it rarely gets what feels like an appropriate space to be processed healthily.
online? not it. too binary, too cliquey, too contextless, too easy to over and underanalyze, too troll-heavy, and people will perform friendship online (relationship?) and be confidential informants irl (snitchuationship™️). [reporting to whom? idk but people be ready with the receipts on people so quickly that i’m like “how was this dossier just at the ready?”]
so where do we land? who wins? who loses? who hurt the most?
well, who got more likes? who got buried? who’s still here? who’s acting “normal?” who haven’t we heard from? who’s still watching?
better yet: who’s all this for?
the pain needs a release, not a rollout, not a premiere.
whether it’s family, friends, community, a therapist, a paint and sip, or rage room, let it out. let it go or it will take you away.
why tf did i choose solution-oriented for this series?
look, everyone’s got freedom of speech. but paragraph 2, subsection 2b of that amendment reads “we also have freedom of shut the fuck up.” okay, damn that’s type spicy. that’s the stand-up version of what i mean—
the mentally well-adjusted version of me says keep some (most) of yourself off the airwaves. the algorithm just consumes until there’s nothing left. vulnerability is way better organic than gmo. tying our mental health to the social media void doesn’t end well.
divest from metrics dictating your life — we are already doing the black mirror “social credit score” and it’s only gonna get worse. i got friends who are so into the numbers and that works for them but they are frazzled when those numbers don’t number right and it’s hard to shake. we already dealing with fake goofy numbers with money, don’t add more math to your life.
social makes us curate the best versions of ourselves and pretend the other parts don’t matter. or worse, curate the most aloof quirky part of ourselves that when some real shit comes along we don’t want to betray our social mask. fuck that. be all of you.
by all means, share but have offline spaces to be messy and keep it there. i’ll say it — it’s hard as hell to trust nowadays, you never know who’s about to put you on smack cam for views. it’s hard work but cultivate friendships where the core of it is pure honesty, a spot to speak and be heard, to shut up and to listen. we don’t just want to be listened to, we wanna be heard. we don’t want to be looked at, we want to be seen.
find people who hold you up, hold you down, hold you back, hold your hand, or just hold you.
as we approach the subscription and gamification event horizon, let this substack make some sense for you.
okay the title is nuts lmao but it’s a good read.
society of the spectacle - guy debord — basically, the “spectacle” (TV, film, news, social, etc) is an illusion that further alienates and isolates us from authenticity and deep community, keeps us in a loop of dissatisfaction and excessive consumption, using images and comparison to hold us captive and passive. [a quick read but here’s the a link to the pdf and a breakdown for all my on-the-go people]
more Monday 🌱 [maybe i’ll add a little mix soon y’all can jam while you scroll 🎶]
happy birthday ryan, miss you every day 🕊