Letter to my Younger Self
Dear Dela,
I am writing to tell you about the future. You’re a wide eyed curious, impulsive girl, I know you’re on the school field fantasizing about high school, will it be like the movies? I wish I could convince you that MSN chatrooms, and knock off blackberries are all you need to worry about right now.
Life is simple now, embrace it. One day, humanity will rely on virtual life to maintain human connection. You’ll have to filter through what’s real and fake, you’ll have to be careful with your words, your actions, your movements.
As a young woman, social media is going to affect your perception of body type, of luxury, of success. As a blooming flower, you will face harsh weather.
The first time you make a social media account will be in secret with your best friend in the sixth grade. Your heart will flutter as your best friend develops an online persona for you as a 20 year old woman, and not a child.How exciting? A whole account for yourself to communicate and laugh with your friends in elementary school. This will be the very first time you lied on social media.
Eventually as you age, technology will advance. By the time you’re in the ninth grade you will have a smartphone and have set up a snapchat account, an instagram account, a twitter account, an ask.fm account, a youtube account, and there’s probably more I forgot about. Point is, you’re going to be thrown into a new environment very quickly, with a tool that has potential to be beneficial, and very dangerous.
The first time you experience the ‘dark’ side of social media will be through online harassment. You will be forced to watch your own nude body on someone else’s device. You will never forget that day, it is the day anxiety made an abrupt entrance in your life, and depression soon followed. Your heart will stop. Your tendency to isolate yourself will grow, out of embarrassment and constant scrutiny you will skip class constantly, you will go home and sleep for hours hoping not to wake. You will start bad habits like smoking weed to numb the violent and never ending emotions. It will be too much too fast, it will hurt like hell but it will be a coming of age moment for you.
Your mistake? trusting too easily. Your first exposure to such a large group of peers, you forgot not everyone has the same heart as you. Your impulsiveness, and his deceit will lure you into a 4 year long journey of battling inner demons, and balancing your emotions.The biggest lesson you will learn is that you can not trust ANYONE, especially over the web. This lesson will serve you well in the future. Enough time will pass and these wounds will eventually appear as nothing more than faded scars.
You will have a conflicting relationship with social media afterwards. Indulging and then isolating yourself when you become overwhelmed with shitty feelings. You will have eyes on people’s lives, but you must remember people only display their highlight reel. Comparing your life with someone else on the basis of social media is poisonous and will lead to such a toxic mental health state. In the age of instagram models, you will feel like you have something to prove all the time, WHEN YOU REALLY HAVE NOTHING TO PROVE TO ANYONE. Some days you’ll want to shut it all down. It is a constant battle between social media and knowing your personal values, what’s real, and what counts in life. Is 1 million likes on a picture of a yacht more valuable than 200 likes on an inspirational quote that has potential to help people who are struggling? Nope. As you reach adulthood I am less worried about your ability to see through the fake-ness people plaster online.
Navigating through social media values is navigating through your own values. In the lecture one thing that stood out to me was this. People have displayed these behavioural and social patterns long before social media, and thus their negative relationship with it comes from personal issues, social media as a tool is not to blame alone.
Your first experiences with social media may be rocky, but as you grow and move onto university you will learn to embrace the difference amazing social media platforms have made. As mentioned earlier, social media can be just as beneficial as it can be dangerous. You will engage with social media as a means of networking, it will be how you were introduced to incredible minds and likeminded artists. Here your inspiration as an artist will flourish, you will start following accounts that appease to you, like poets, spiritual guides, and successful women in male dominated industries. You will eventually cut off people who you used to keep on to be ‘nice’, when their posts would bother you. Once you cut off the excess weight, you will seek your own niche and you will notice a massive switch in frequency. Darkness will turn into light.
young girl, I want you to experience the bad just as much a I want you to experience the good. Without the internal struggle you wouldn’t be in the process of becoming the woman I know that you know I have potential to be, with tools like social media on my side.
