Gif description: A scene from the animated show The Simpsons, where Marge asks Homer, “Is any of that true?” To which Homer replies, “Once I post it on Reddit, it will be.”
Let me start off by saying that this is not a promotional or paid post. Reddit doesn’t know who I am, let alone care enough to pay me to say nice words about them.
I am simply a very passionate person and actively feel like it’s my duty to write a Yelp review for things that impact me. There’s not really a Yelp equivalent for social media, but maybe there should be. I dunno, I’ll leave that to the Zuckerbergs of the world to figure out if that’s a marketable idea.
*trigger warning: talks of depression
When you have depression, you sometimes tell yourself that you become a burden on your loved ones because you can’t just be happy and enjoy things or exist without that depression. It’s not merely sadness, it’s exhaustion to the point of apathy.
So let me put this out there for context: I love eating. I love eating so much that I often abandon craving-fueled quests in favor of just accepting the quick and easy foods because that means that I get to eat sooner.
Those who know me can attest to the fact that until I eat, I am a useless being. Some people have a one track mind when it comes to sex. I have a one-track mind when it comes to food.
Food is the basic need that I must satisfy before I can do anything else. I’ve rerouted entire schedules so that food was factored in. I’ve planned itineraries around restaurants before deciding if I was going to buy the plane tickets. I’ve organized parties based on themed foods.
I love eating.
But there are days when I get so depressed, that I don’t eat.
It doesn’t matter what food I’m offered - if I’m not in the mood to eat, I won’t. I don’t have the energy to swallow something like pudding. I don’t have the motivation to make a sandwich. I feel burdensome ordering delivery, and then chastise myself for spending money on food, telling myself that I don’t deserve to treat myself to takeout when I couldn't muster the energy to just eat what's in the house.
My husband has begged me to eat anything on those days, often asking “if you could eat anything in the world right now, absolutely anything, what would it be?” And I have no answer. Because in my mind right now, food doesn’t matter. My survival does not matter. My existence does not matter. My life does not matter.
That is depression for me. That’s what I am capable of inflicting upon myself, by myself. I don’t need any help belittling my life to me.
So when I would log on to Facebook, check up on Twitter, peruse the news, scroll through Tumblr, swipe through Instagram, and sneak a peek at Snapchat and constantly constantly constantly see people arguing about whether or not my life mattered, if the lives of those who looked like me mattered, it was like witnessing thousands of myselves deciding whether I deserved to eat today. And that was the media that I consumed day in and day out with no distractions because the world was shut down due to the pandemic and there really wasn't much else for me to do.
So I logged off. I deleted apps. And for a few precious moments, it helped. The constant barrage of verbal abuse and graphic videos had ceased. But that didn’t mean that it all went away. It was still happening. And now I had nothing to silence my thoughts.
Gif description: A diver in a metal cage surrounded by sharks encircling him. The diver communicates with a comm link off screen. The comm link responds, "Are you okay?" The diver answers "Um... am I okay? They're coming from every direction."
The thousands of myselves were now amplified in the deafening silence. Whispers in my ear: “What’s the point of doing training to ready yourself to go back to work when the people you’re supposed to help are probably the people mowing protestors over with trucks?
“Why are you even thinking about reaching out to a friend to talk about something as mundane as comic books when they’re busy sharing posts about how the police system was structured by slavery? They’re not even black and they’re doing more for the cause than you are.
“You can’t even escape into the friendly world of Animal Crossing now because you keep thinking about the black people in the online communities who complained about being followed around by white players on their virtual islands so they wouldn’t steal anything.”
It got really bad for me.
I never dared to venture into Reddit before. I equated it with my unconfirmed prediction of what Imgur or 4chan is like, assuming it was nothing but aggro males running wild without inhibitions.
I don’t really know why that became my assumption. Possibly because a lot of the memes and screenshots that my male friends shared in our group chats were the terrifying parts of the internet that usually came from Reddit or 4chan or Imgur. But I’m beginning to realize that my male friends just enjoy invoking terror and disgust in us, hence why we had to create a separate group-chat specifically titled “I had to suffer, and now so do you” -- which later got cleaned up to be “Cocktail Party of Suffering.” We laugh, we schmooze, we cry, we puke - it’s our thing.
Gif description: Hades from the animated film Hercules gestures while saying, “We dance, we kiss, we schmooze, we carry on, we go home happy.”
My husband has a Reddit and, call it bias, but I didn’t see him as being that part of the cringe internet, or as I call it, the "cringe-ternet." He’s not one of the ones that usually posts the cringe but surely he’s come across it. And he really doesn’t use social media – he only got a Facebook so he could keep in touch with the squad while he was studying abroad – so the fact that he did have a Reddit didn’t really tell me what to think.
Maybe I just told myself he was a passive observer of the cringe-ternet and didn’t think anything else of it. I didn’t pry into his Reddit and he didn’t pry into my Tumblr and we told ourselves it was for the best and left it at that.
Gif description: An anonymous Tumblr user asking fellow Tumblr user lindsaylohanthony “Do you have a Tumblr?” Because the answer is obviously yes, user lindsaylohanthony responds with gif of a boy rolling his eyes.
I’ve had to take two detoxes from social media in my entire internet journey, and both were caused by the state of discrimination in our country.
I am a black queer atheistic woman with mental issues who’s lived below the poverty line her whole life. It’s like I decided to play Oppression Bingo, and being born black was the free space I started the round with and kept it going with one hell of a hot streak. Not saying I’m more or less discriminated against than others, just saying that, you know, things could be easier.
So when a period of unrest flares up in our country, I almost always directly see myself impacted. The Black Lives Matter movement was no exception and it hit me big time. And I guess I thought I was building up that thicker skin that actual medical professionals think black people literally have, because I never before shied away from reading the comments, from watching the videos, from sharing the articles — even though I could never even stomach watching the news because of the traumatic things happening to people like me.
It’s not like I didn’t know this stuff happened to our people. I’ve witnessed my share of it. But I still never saw myself as being a potential victim because I told myself I wasn’t giving anyone a probable reason to find me suspicious. I didn’t feel like I gave anybody a reason to hate me. Boy, was I wrong!
“It is not the job of the oppressed to educate the oppressors.”
I haven’t intentionally surrounded myself with people who didn’t align with my beliefs or morals, but there’s always a friend you’ve never had that conversation with, or that distant relative who has never popped up on your Facebook until now, or that employee you never knew viewed your people that way. I don’t want to say it’s a blind spot because how much can you know about every single person you interact with? It’s not like you get a bulleted list of their core values and internalizations and opinions. It comes to light when there’s a flare up. Just like the discrimination, it doesn’t just suddenly exist, but it has just come up in your news feed. And the more it comes up, the more people talk about it.
And it’s good to have a discussion, to have the opportunity to educate people and to express your feelings. There are times where I am so grateful that we live in an age that can document these transgressions and share them so rapidly that there’s no way to ignore the evidence. I’m grateful that people are taking action and that you can clearly see how many people support it and call out those that stand in the way of progress. It can, in a way, be healing to know that people see you, hear you, and share in your pain.
However, I have also seen this sentiment going around:
It is not the job of the oppressed to educate the oppressors.
To paraphrase Audre Lord, when the oppressors make it the responsibility of the oppressed to teach them their mistakes, the oppressors maintain their role as oppressors. They aren’t taking responsibility for oppressing their victims, and it becomes another form of oppression by creating a constant drain of energy on the victims. And for me, that took the form of me being so drained, so exhausted, so disheartened that I decided the best way for me to survive was to stop talking to people altogether.
I needed an outlet that let me stay away from stuff I couldn’t handle at the moment, but still had a platform for discussion when I was ready for it, and didn’t require me to build up a following or add twenty starter friends or customize my queue by hacking through promoted videos. I didn’t know that Reddit would offer that to me, but the way my then-fiancé-now-husband was able to enjoy a subset of social media without constantly sighing was alluring, and most of the laughs we had shared lately were things he showed me from Reddit.
Gif description: Baby Rapunzel from the Disney film Tangled sighs wistfully as she stares at the sky outside her tower window.
So at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, I opened a new tab within the sea of the 457 wedding planning tabs that I still had open — I never close my tabs, and apparently I would only plan for our wedding when I couldn’t get to sleep — and went to Reddit.com. I was not ready to fully invest in downloading the Reddit app and I will fully admit that I’m a hot mess. And since I was already in the mindset of weddings, I typed wedding in the search bar. I came across a subgroup r/weddingsunder10k and I was like, “finally, somebody gets it! I don’t care about spending thousands of dollars on stuff I can’t afford for 6-8 hours that a bunch of plastered folks won’t notice!” (No offense to my beloved drunks).
I came across a post someone made showcasing their DIY invitations. The comments were here and there, mostly saying they didn’t look good. I felt bad. They weren’t awful, and it is a struggle to perfectly align washi tape.
Having a background in art, and also arts and crafts, and also also poverty, I knew how to make something look good on a budget. I still didn’t want to get a Reddit, but I wanted to help her and I couldn't respond to her post without creating an account. I expressed my sadness to my fiancé the next day, and then he handed me his phone and told me to look up their username and slide into her DMs through his account. So I offered my two cents and told her that she didn’t need to toss the whole batch, and for a split second, my desire for helpfulness had beat out my feeling of helplessness. It was almost a rush to call upon myself for advice, albeit unsolicited, and remind myself of something that I knew I was good at. I know that’s just the depression talking, but still.
Combing through the r/weddingsunder10k subreddit became therapeutic for me, and eventually I branched out to exploring a few other subreddits. Not long after that, my desire to comment back on some of the threads persuaded me to download the app and get my own account. My then-fiancé-now-husband was happy that I was happy again, at least for a moment, and he found it adorable that I had managed to follow an absurd amount of cat-themed communities in my short time being there.
Since creating my own Reddit account, I’ve been able to curtail content that might trigger me, and curate my dashboard to content that makes me happy. But let me be perfectly clear – Reddit is not without it's flaws. It is still a part of the lawless Wild Wild Internet that is home to many a weenie that likes to hide behind the comforting anonymity of a screen. For my own emotional security, I avoid the News tab and tend to focus on my eclectic feeds of cats on things and Black hair advice now that wedding planning is behind me. But at that time, Reddit was the only way I could escape into my phone without immediately feeling overwhelmed because I got to curate what I was bombarded with.
For example, if I didn't follow any subreddits (group topics/facets within Reddit), it would do it's best to guess what I wanted, but short of random ads, it never really hit the mark without my input. And even when I did follow a subreddit, it was few and far between when it would recommend another similar group to me and when it did, it was a good thing. Who among us hasn't relied on the immediate serotonin flow by scrolling through cat memes and silly pet videos? Well I found and followed over 30 different subreddits on different cat-based situations without even trying: cats sitting on stereos, cats sitting on a glass table where their feet disappear underneath them, cats sitting with their tails wrapped around their feet, cats afraid of aluminum foil, cats perplexed by magic tricks, chunky cats, fluffy cats, toasty cats, grumpy cats. cats with their "airplane ears" sticking backward, cats who meow like they've been smoking twelve packs a day, and my personal favorite – cats sitting on pizza boxes, because of course I would find the single group of cat behavior that would explain some of my own cat's weirdness. I finally understand the extent to which if she fits she sits and if it's warm she swarm. Because of this, I believe my cat and I have a far deeper relationship of understanding as we both enjoy sitting where the warm is.
Gif description: Tall human wearing a giant cat mascot head climbs into a cardboard box and sits. And yes, I could have used literally any actual cat gif here, but this is far more terrifying.
And then you had subreddits that would improve my day on a more long-term scale. For example, r/savedyouaclick is a facet aimed specifically at helping you avoid clickbait by jumping on the grenade for you and telling you what it's about. Granted, that won't protect you from the resurgence of the Rick Roll (and no, I swear on my stack of Static Shock comics that I will not Rick Roll you in this post. I reserve the right to do so at a later date, though). You had r/therapy groups that would share tips and advice one learned in therapy, and give their experiences on finding the right therapist that worked for them. Up until that point, I pretty much assumed I'd be stuck with the same doc whether I liked them or not because thanks to the magic of limited health insurance, that was typically my experience with every doctor.
And then out of The Good, The Rad, and The Crazy, we have subreddits like r/thomastheplankengine. It is just a flow of madness from people remembering their weird dreams and doing their best to reinterpret and illustrate them through their limited Photoshopping skills to post them to the internet for us to crack a laugh. It's not even about dream dissection, it's just "so this is what my brain came up with last night... don't know why... enjoy." Just pure confusion and frequently unique comedy. I'd get repeated entertainment from posts on there as I would share them with my husband who has his own weird dreams that he occasionally narrates in his sleep. Then when someone would hop on the thread to ask for context or relay their similarly odd dream, I'd be reminded of the hilarity. And then I'd be reminded of my own odd dreams. And just like that, my brain would have a days worth of distraction without the exhausting effort to find my own escapism.
And it wasn't just the sense of escapism that Reddit provided me. It was the sense of control. I got to control what I saw, what I shared, what part of my identity was shared, what facets of Reddits I wanted to view at a time and if I wanted to, I could organize them into their own neat little bucket until I was ready to look at them again. I could share things with people who didn't have a Reddit without them being forced to download a new app. I could spend the whole day deep diving into one subreddit and never have to poke my head out to see the world burning down around me. Or I could curate my own catalog of helpful subreddits to share with others when I had the strength to stretch beyond my own enjoyment. There's even a r/BlackPeopleTwitter to pick up the highlight reel of the more famous threads from Twitter when I can't bring myself to flip up the bird that day.
I've bookmarked posts to maybe reference in a blog post later, and I've shared my cache of wedding planning subreddits with one of my best friends who is now planning her own DIY wedding. Perhaps most importantly, I've discovered a whole slew of new reaction gifs and memes to barrage my friends with when they post the most absurd content that a standard emoji reaction just won't suffice. And if I didn't look at Reddit for a day, or a week, or a month even, I never felt the sting of FOMO or wondered how I would ever catch up to what I missed. Because I only missed what I chose to miss. And the latest breaking news that I'd need to catch up with? r/toebeans.
I know I'm part of that wonky generation whatever we're called that grew up on the cusp of switching over from landlines to smartphones, but the thought of being disconnected from the world is still a scary one. Especially when missing out on certain content could jeopardize your relationships or your safety nowadays. But wow, I do not know how I would have gotten through the roughest parts of the pandemic without Reddit. It was and still is such a relief to be able to settle into my comfy seat, scroll through Reddit, and not have to feel like the living embodiment of "This is fine."
Gif description: Animated scene of the popular meme of a dog wearing a hat, sitting in a burning building with his coffee mug, uttering simply, "This is fine." When clearly, everything was not fine.
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