Your Friend/ My Friend, Social Media

Do you remember social media in elementary school? Of course you don’t— it didn’t even exist
then. And yet, I saw the old photo you posted to Facebook, the one of your birthday party at the
McDonald’s indoor playground when you were a kid. I don’t know how old you were then,
maybe four or five, but I know the restaurant location. No matter the location or how old you
were, you’re with your friends with food in front of you: a store-bought Dairy Queen ice cream
cake, Happy Meals, and ketchup.
Knowing you, the Happy Meal would have an abundance of pickles on the hamburger
that lived inside, as well as French fries and a Monsters Inc. toy. Not because the extra pickles
came with the burger normally but because you specifically asked for them. I would be shocked
if you had one burger without a mountain of pickles, but you were younger then. The idea of you
not having extra pickles in your all-American beef burger makes me laugh, although I’m sure
you didn’t care as much about your choices in food at one point in your life. I’m sure someone
remembers when you didn’t care as much.
You didn’t know social media before, but you’re close friends with all the platforms now.
Social media is all over the world; I have no idea how or why. It has always looked intriguing
and bursting with new information. That’s what brings me back to the young photo at
McDonald’s, with your chocolate milk in hand and messy fingers. There’s an arm around you
belonging to your childhood best friend. You’re probably waiting impatiently to open birthday
presents.
The photo wasn’t originally intended for social media. In the twenty-two years I’ve
known you, I can’t remember a time before media took off that you would take a picture of
yourself or ask someone to take a photo of you. Social media, though, has lots of photos of
everyone. There’s a bunch of pictures of people that are probably used to asking for their photo
to be taken. You’re sitting in the old indoor playground chairs from the early 2000’s, wearing
jeans and your favorite butterfly shirt, with a wide, innocent smile that has a tooth missing and
ketchup smudged on one cheek. There’s nothing like a picture of a young child who still has
their naivety and innocence, maybe because the modern world hasn’t caught up to them yet, like
for example, the crippling burden to always be present and relevant online. The closest thing you
would know about being online is the online games on your Dial-up Internet that would take
forever to load— with that unforgettable, noisy sound that you would try to muffle because it
scared you— and had to be shared with the landline telephone.
Maybe you and your childhood friends would stay friends for life and reminisce about
those times together at the McDonald’s birthday parties and the childhoods you had together.
Maybe you would realize how lucky you had it then: no worries, no cares, and no
responsibilities, nothing urgent or needing to be taken care of immediately. Who knows—
maybe you all would grow into young adults together and be brides maids at each other’s
weddings and have similar interests for the rest of your lives. Can you picture it?
You probably think about those childhood friends with a pang every now and then while
you eat a burger with pickles stacked high. Despite the new world social media has opened up,
you miss those friends and see them only occasionally through a screen. It sometimes hurts you
to think back to that missing-tooth smile and those carefree times with childhood friends and
compare it to now. I can only imagine that you wish you could feel like a kid again, without any
pressures from an app or social media website to live your life a certain way. Even though you
love feeling free from any addictions or dependences, you still can’t seem to kick the itch to
always check your phone or see what the newest post is on the trending page. Since you’ll feel
anxious for spending so much time with social media later, you tell yourself you’ll spend time
away from your phone and do some meditating and reading. You and social media can set up
times to be together so you aren’t devoting so much time to it.
In another photo on Facebook, I see a family get together with everyone wearing shorts
and short sleeves so it must be summer. A volleyball net sits in one corner of the shot, a
backyard deck on the other side. Cousins and friends are running around with water guns,
laughing and spraying each other. You stand further away from the water gun chaos, and
although the camera is far away from you, it looks like you could be smiling. Your little
childhood dog is nearby the cousins, which is another pang in your gut when you think about
him. If there was one thing you made clear on your social media, you wanted to spend more time
with him. After all that’s happened, I worry that you were right to want that. You always seemed
to regret.
Social media does exist at the time of this picture, but you still remain mostly oblivious to
its charms. I imagine how lucky this younger version of you must be, not a kid anymore but still
living in the moment with no distractions. You live in the flat lands with your parents and
siblings and the dog Buster. You have a wood deck and water gun fights in your life. The aunts
and uncles are drinking beers and talking and laughing together. Your parents have a nice house
and family that comes around randomly to visit in the summer.
I don’t really use social media besides to stay updated with family, but you seemed to be
enthralled with all aspects of it. Even if you were out for a short amount of time, just to study or
be with friends, you always had your phone with you in one hand. You no longer take photos just
to remember the day but to share them on social media and see how many people it reaches.
However, like the photo of the younger you on your birthday, the photo in the yard of your
childhood home has an air of authenticity. No one in the photo is posing or changing posture to
look perfect or prove they are any different than they are. Your attention is fully on happily
watching your cousins and family play and be together, and your young face seems content. I
imagine someone else on social media would see this photo and immediately start comparing
their childhood memories to yours.
Maybe you and your childhood friends would still try to stay connected through social
media once you got older. The photo you shared that included them when you were all younger
might have been a cry for help or attention, something none of them ever expected you to do.
How strange to see you and your friend so happy; only you’re not kids anymore— she’s a grown
woman with problems you couldn’t have known when you were young. But at least you get to
see her all grown up. What a privilege. And even though you haven’t acknowledge each other’s
existence in years (you have really grown apart), the photo is a permanent reminder of a time
before social media and before your childhood became the modern world.
The photo in the backyard with your family and friends reminds me you’re an average
sized girl. There’s kindness and light in your young eyes, and you look like you could make
friends easily. You’re beautiful. The hair that falls past your waist is a deep brunette color.
You’re wearing faded light blue overalls and a bright blue T-shirt. The dog is close by your side.
The cousins are playing and spraying each other, carefree. Though the pockets of your overalls
are deep, I still see the disposable camera poking out from the one facing the camera that
captured this photo. It’s the same kind you used to love to take pictures with and get the film
developed. Maybe it’s the same disposable camera that you had when you were in your teens,
when we met.
It was in the fall when you decided to be like everyone else in your grade and make a
Facebook account. You had long outgrown water gun fights, McDonald’s birthday parties, and
overalls, but you still had your brunette hair and disposable cameras. The clothes you wore could
never be perfect enough for you, in your eyes. You still liked the idea of taking pictures, but now
you were being introduced to the term “selfie” and were constantly flooded with posed pictures
of your peers. When did you throw your disposable cameras away to instead take pictures of
yourself on your smartphone? Did you keep any of the blurry but candid photos that you got
developed?
You probably weren’t thinking about whether you’d get addicted to social media or not
when you made your first account. So much has happened since those childhood photos. You
always feel distraught when you think about all the memories you can’t get away from, and
there’s so much stress as you become older. I know you wanted to get away from it all somehow,
and social media was the one thing you felt like you could escape into. Your friends, new and
old, weren’t there for you like you needed them to be, so you instead took to absorbing as much
useless information and posts as you could. You felt guilty procrastinating like that so often;
there was homework that had to be done and chores to do. You locked yourself away in your
room so often, mindlessly scrolling.
Your mom began to notice your shift in moods and how your nose was always buried in
your phone. On the rare occasion you would be downstairs with the rest of your family when you
didn’t have homework you were procrastinating completing, you were still on your phone, with
headphones in, blocking out the real world. You and your parents sometimes got into small
arguments over how often your phone was present. They couldn’t understand where the
obsession had come from, and they could only remember how happy you were when you wore
overalls and used disposable cameras. When your parents would ground you from your phone,
you would become irrational and cry and yell at them to give it back. I know you regretted it;
you confided in me once that you wanted to try and fix your relationship with them and make
things how they used to be. I suggested you tell your parents the truth of how you were feeling
and maybe they would understand, which you did. But your parents didn’t, couldn’t understand
that you suffered from the dependency on your escape, so the grounding and arguments
continued.
 I’m sure all of your “friends” on social media sympathized with you when you made
those angry posts and wondered where this side of you had come from. Anyone that had known
you before knew you weren’t an angry person. Frustrated, maybe, but troubled and addicted to
perfection? No, not you. You were never the type to spend hours looking in the mirror before
school, locating every imperfection and covering it up, until you suddenly were that type. You
used to feel a sense of pride in yourself after you completed a task, especially if it was a
challenge. You had fire in your heart and a liveliness in your expressions. It was noticed when
you made those changes and social media entered the picture. It was like you had flipped a
switch.
No one had known to warn you about it. It wasn’t knowledge that was readily available
then— it was such a new concept, and it only started to evolve with everything else. Even the
social media creators probably didn’t know how big their creations would be one day. But they
still got their money for other people’s distractions and addictions. It’s a tactic, a scheme, to get
the public to think the way they want people to think. You know this now, and yet you still can’t
give it up. If you had it your way, you would spend your days on your phone, scrolling through
all the posts with hundreds of reactions, and images with people showing perfect skin and
flattering backgrounds.
What happened to you?
You will not rest, you say. You will not rest until you can be like those popular people
and have all the attention and “likes” on you. You say this to yourself in the mirror, picking
mentally at all the things you see as flaws on your face, your hair— you. You’re not allowing
yourself to be happy in your skin until you can be just like everyone else. Even then, if you were
like those social media models, it wouldn’t be enough. I can see how, after no one believed that
you had mental health problems and all that time spent comparing yourself to others, that it
would eventually only cause you more problems. Obviously you believed everything you told
yourself or you wouldn’t have been so miserable in your own skin.
Did you keep those disposable cameras after all? Even if it was just for a memory of your
childhood? Is there any part of you left that remembers what it feels like to have complete focus
and joy while taking on a challenge? Do you even challenge yourself at all anymore? Or are you
too focused on posting about every part of your life, sharing the latest pictures and most relatable
descriptions? Do you ever take photos just so you have a piece of a moment you want to
remember, just because? Maybe the memory of those days of overalls with a disposable camera
in the pocket comes up every now and then, and you can remind yourself of how you used to be
happy without an online presence.
You called me the other day to tell me that you think you were losing your mind. You
must have finally cracked under all the pressure you had put on yourself. We talked for a few
minutes about what was happening in your life; the stress that you could no longer handle, the
burn out you were experiencing, and the sadness you felt within yourself. I told you then that you
could handle it; I mean, you had always been able to handle it before.
Maybe you’re different now.
 I remember your childhood friends, how they were always there for you when you were
younger. When you drifted apart from them, from your young self, you should have had the tools
to move on and make new connections. Social media, however, took the place of those friends
instead. The acquaintances and classmates you occasionally talked to from high school should
have been your new friends, but you envied and marveled at them from afar on social media,
wishing to be friends but not remembering how it’s done. You probably never pictured you being
dependent on an app for interaction with your peers.
I send you a message after you call saying how sorry I am that you are having a hard
time. I ask if I can send you a friend request on Facebook. After all, you could probably use a
friend after the way you have felt. When you accept, I find the old childhood photos of the
McDonald’s birthday party and the water gun fight in the backyard, and I stare at them, trying to
connect them to the current version of you that you had described. I can tell you are mourning
that part of yourself by the captions that you posted along with the photos. Facebook sent it out
for the internet to see because, of course, nothing could be wrong. It’s been years I’m sure, but
your childhood friends from the photos have commented how much they miss you. I imagine
that like me, they think about you all the time but are too busy to act on it. You were always a
nice person, a good friend. Maybe, like me, your old friends go on your Facebook photos
searching for the real you.
When I post on your wall that I’m thinking about you and hoping all is well, your friends
comment, too. You don’t ever respond back. I wonder if it helps you to know that even though
it’s through your addiction, I am still keeping you in my thoughts. You don’t answer your texts
as often, and I couldn’t stand calling you and hearing your voice cracking under your self-
inflicted pressure and hatred.
Did you think that social media would take over your life when you made that harmless
Facebook account? That I would reach out to you years later, trying to get you to realize your
self-worth again? That I’d study the pictures of your childhood, hoping to gain some knowledge
of where you went wrong?
And this is just me. I’m on the periphery of your life. If you knew I would take the time
to write all of this down, would you reconsider how you treated yourself and used social media
as an escape? Would it have snapped you awake to the reality that how you treat yourself
impacts others? Me and your childhood, we’re on the outside of the bubble you have trapped
yourself in. If it’s this hurtful for me to see you now, imagine how bad it must feel for those that
are closer to the bubble.
I imagine what would have happened if you had never felt the need the escape into social
media. I picture you outside, with your hair down, your friends surrounding you with smiles on
their faces, talking about interests and what their plans were for the weekend. One of them might
tell you that they couldn’t imagine a better existence for you. You’d agree with a laugh.
Everyone is happy and worry-free. You’re so glad you could spend your life enjoying every
second of it. Your friends are glad, too.
 I wouldn’t know so much about you if your life hadn’t gone this way. That would be
better. I’m sure you would think so, too.