I Miss When Twitter Was Funny
Mental Health in the Age of Collective Grief
Nostalgia is a dangerous drug. These days it’s flooding in from the empty streets to those of us in quarantine, with fond memories of hugging a friend, hopping on a plane, or even just going out to eat. However, it didn’t take a global pandemic for most of us to realize that our memories don’t always amount to an accurate representation of the past. Sometimes I look back with rose-colored glasses and wonder if I really was happier back then. And sometimes I know that I was.
What’s scary is when your memories start to take on a darker shade. I’ve started to see some of them through a gray cloud, like my past took place in a confusing and ominous dream. Thanks to social media, some of those instances are recorded, stamped, and locked into time. Sometimes I go back into Facebook and Twitter to revisit old pictures and read all those old words. I look into my eyes that were facing the camera — 2, 5, 10 years ago — and try to get a hint as to how much darkness I was really feeling then.
It’s hard to know how much to trust my own version of the past, or whether to just write it off as some revisionist history that is more indicative of how I’m feeling right now. What I do know is that other people my age have described this same darkness in their own memories. And that this darkness has consumed their past more and more as time has progressed throughout the last decade. Part of me is glad that I’m not the only one experiencing this phenomenon, but another part is concerned with how we are collectively coping with the world around us.
This story brings back media from the past. It’s as honest and thorough as I can make it. This story begins with a car ride, and it ends with “I don’t know.”
Rumination: Obsessive thinking about an idea, situation, or choice especially when it interferes with normal mental functioning.
If you suffer from depression, you know that it’s hard to account for when it started. For me, it came on slowly, over the course of many years, and presented itself in many different ways. However, it wasn’t until my junior year in college that it really started manifesting.
On Easter morning, my parents picked me up to go spend the day with extended family in Spokane. After an hour and a half drive, we arrived at my grandparent’s house for one of the first times since my Grandma had died a year before. Shortly after us, my aunt Jenny arrived with her caregiver. She had been diagnosed with slow progression ALS almost 10 years prior, and I watched while my uncles helped to maneuver her power chair up the homemade ramp and into the living room.
At that point in time, she had lost the use of her arms and legs, and most recently, her ability to speak clearly. Her body was a barely working shell of what it used to be, but when you looked into her eyes, there was never a doubt that she was all the way there.
I had seen my best friend’s dad lose a long and slow battle with brain cancer — but ALS felt even more insidious. The disease terrified me, and I’m sad to say that I turned my back to it whenever I got the chance. I said “hi” to Jenny, and went downstairs to watch basketball.
Duke was playing Louisville in the Elite 8 of the NCAA Tournament. For those not familiar, it was a notable game, but not for one of the reasons you might expect. In the first half, Louisville forward Kevin Ware came down on one of his legs awkwardly and suffered a gruesome compound fracture. All of the players on the court immediately turned away, and you could see that they were scared and shaken up. After showing the injury on replay one time, the broadcast quickly went to commercial, realizing the graphic nature of the situation. I went upstairs for Easter dinner, but the image of the injury kept looping in my head.
It was dark outside by the time we merged onto the two-lane highway between Spokane and Pullman. When I tried to sleep, I saw looping visions of Kevin Ware’s leg, and Jenny’s eyes alive in a disabled and dying body. Instead, I watched the beams of light from oncoming traffic, and imagined a head on collision every time they passed.
Over the next few months, I developed this feeling of being intensely alone. For the first time, I felt terrified to die, and I obsessed over it constantly. It felt like I was trapped in my body, and the only way out was through an agonizing death. I started having nightmares, and I dreaded going to bed. When I slept, my body would tense up so that in the morning, I woke up feeling like I hadn’t rested. Then eventually, even my days started to feel like a bad dream. One weekend, I was clipping some branches from overgrown trees in the backyard. For the rest of the day and weeks after, I couldn’t help but dwell on this fabricated image of my fingers being lopped off individually with the pruning shears.
I had trouble imagining whether I had always had these types of ruminations. Certainly they were never that bad. I looked back at memories like road trips and music festivals with friends — at least in my version of the past, those seemed like brighter days.
Eventually, I scheduled an appointment with a doctor at Student Health and Wellness. Through a series of questionnaire tests, I was diagnosed with depression and obsessive thoughts disorder and prescribed 20 mg of Lexapro. I knew that one doctor’s opinion didn’t change anything, but I at least felt that there was a reason behind what I was feeling. I had something to call it.
Escapism: the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy.
It was September 2014, my last semester at college, and Twitter was still funny.
I had spent the previous summer in Pullman, taking classes and working part time in the Writing Center. Mostly, I lounged around in my overheated apartment reading books and drinking cheap jugs of Carlo Rossi wine. I was bored and sad, which is to say I had few complaints. I laid on the floor at night and listened to the songs that my friends in Seattle had sent me. And I read Weird Twitter.
My Roommate had shared some accounts with me at the start of the summer, and I slowly became obsessed with the cartoon avis and absurdist humor of Fred Delicious, Karate Horse, and Brent.
The internet humor that was popular throughout most of my college career consisted mostly of viral videos and meme generators. Weird Twitter was something different.
When the semester started however, I had to trade zany accounts like Carrot Facts for police reports and courtroom documents — I was the Senior Cops and Courts breaking news reporter for the Daily Evergreen that fall. A student newspaper might not seem too serious, but we printed daily, so we put in a lot of time. In addition to writing crime briefs and a breaking news story every day, they asked me to cover ongoing court cases, which often took me to the Whitman County Courthouse in Colfax. They also asked me to sleep with a police monitor at night so I would know about potential stories before anyone else.
Between my post at the newspaper, and my part time work with LandEscapes and the Writing Center, I was busy — that is, I was distracted. And for the first time in my life I was medicated, which was probably for the best. Some stories that I covered were harmless and lighthearted, like the man who got drunk and locked himself in a stranger’s car.
But we also covered deaths, suicides, and the record number of sexual assaults reported on campus that semester.
When you’re reporting on a tragedy, someone’s worst day becomes about deadlines, narratives, and revisions. You’re told to ask the questions that no one wants to hear. And you aren’t allowed to act like a human being when you get the answer. Even on the scale of a small daily paper, it takes its toll. We kept up on upsetting trends across the country, and read some of the most personal statements from courtrooms and police records. You don’t have to be a reporter to realize that people all around the world are suffering. But reporting on suffering makes it impossible to run from. In our news coverage, we faced dilemmas that made us choose between public safety and personal privacy. We made the best decisions we could based on common sense and 4 years of public higher education.
One morning, a police sergeant called me and told me that due to my reporting, I had ruined his rape investigation.
In late October, I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what it felt like to have one, so I woke up in the middle of the night and felt like I was dying. I felt like every bad feeling I’d ever had was spreading through my body and into my lungs, and I couldn't breathe. I crawled to my roommate’s room, woke him up, and begged him to take me to the hospital while I tried to stay conscious. Luckily, his girlfriend knew exactly what was happening, and eventually they got me breathing normally again.
I was in a haze the next day — I was still feeling very haunted by the sense of death that woke me up and attacked my lungs the night before. After my classes ended, I met with my news editor — he had a breaking news story that he needed me to cover. I told him about my panic attack and how I needed some space from writing for a couple of days. He told me that he understood, but that we really needed to post the story before the weekend. I spent the rest of that Friday afternoon interviewing sources and throwing together 750 words on the University of Idaho’s new sexual assault policies.
After that weekend, I scaled back my time at the newspaper. I still wrote the daily crime briefs, and worked on some longer form investigative pieces like Safe Haven, a feature story on a refugee from Syria. But I took myself out of the breaking news circuit and started screening calls from my editor during certain hours of the day. With the extra time, I caught up on school and booked more hours at the Writing Center. I got into a better routine, and I carved out an hour each week where I would hang out in the Student Union Building before an evening shift, and eat panda express for dinner (Two entree plate — Kung Pow and Orange Chicken with fried rice).
I also leaned on friends — one more than he probably realized. We watched a movie every week, played video games, and shared music over Spotify. And to round out my escape, I scrolled through weird twitter — it was just as funny and stupid as ever.
One cold and misty Saturday in November, I woke up feeling off. Even though there was a Cougar football game in town that day, I decided to watch on TV — it was the only game I ever missed. At one point, our quarterback was sandwiched between two players, and pulled down awkwardly. He had suffered a compound fracture of the tibia and fibula, and you could hear him screaming even on the broadcast. So I turned off the TV and tried to put it out of my mind. I think I listened to music instead.
All things considered, I think I was doing well my last two months of college. I look fondly at pictures from a road trip I took with a friend to Corvallis, Oregon in late fall. How much am I glorifying those times now? The pictures from that trip don’t give much of a hint.
When it came time to graduate, I was ready to leave Pullman. It was the first place in my life that had tangible markers of that death feeling — on the highway, in my apartment, in the places all over campus where I had ruminated in silence and continued on with my day. The last time I went into the newsroom, I was notified that my September 11th feature story was a top 3 finalist for a collegiate national award. To be honest, I didn’t care. I packed up my stuff, made a Spotify playlist called The Final Drive, and I hit the road. I was ready to get to Seattle.
Inundation: an overabundance of something.
I accepted an office job when I moved to Seattle, and quickly picked up habits of some of the best desk jockeys. Looking back, it probably wasn’t the best job for me to get straight out of college. It came with all of the downsides of an 8–5 — sedentary work, bureaucracy, a dress code — with few of the upsides — a comfortable salary, managerial structure, mental stimulation.
I wasn’t being challenged at work, so instead I made happy hour plans, found great places to eat lunch, and spent a lot of time on the internet.
I still scrolled the Weird Twitter profiles, but my extensive time in front of the screen opened the door to more content than just cheap laughs. In a word, I became Online. I read articles on existentialism, fidelity, and urban development — feature stories on Tiger Woods and Kurt Cobain. I consumed long form pieces about chemical spills in Japan, impending floods in Indonesia, and homelessness in LA.
It’s safe to say that I had my finger on the pulse around the world, and all the good/bad, the funny/terrifying were collected on my feed — and presented on my dual screen monitors — waiting for me every weekday when I got off the bus.
Later in 2015, the focus of each news cycle turned to the presidential primary elections. I became obsessed with things like Universal Healthcare and clean water after realizing how many people didn’t have those things. I was becoming concerned with the number of people who didn’t seem to care, or have the same amount of urgency as me. I was becoming concerned about the undercurrent of deep seeded racism and hate that was starting to show itself across the country.
At this point, I was starting to develop stomach issues and neck pain. I blamed my diet and ergonomics, and tried to adjust my work space. I was under-stimulated at work, and had trouble finding direction in other aspects of my life. My weekend plans became the only thing in my life that I was excited for. As a result, I counted down the days and hours until Friday evenings, and developed this sinking paranoia that I was always getting sick. Every morning, I woke up feeling like I was coming down with something, and I would spend the rest of the day analyzing how my throat, head, and stomach felt.
I was numb from under-stimulation and over-worry, and every Sunday night, another week of sitting with my own brain felt to exhausting to cope with. When I ran out of my most recent bottle of SSRIs, I decided not to refill, and went off my medication cold turkey. After a week of withdrawal side effects, I hoped that ditching the chemical dependency might give me some of the clarity and comfort that I was looking for.
My chronic neck pain and hypochondria continued, and my anxiety found new ways to manifest itself. But after discontinuing my medication, I did feel a renewed sense of clarity. The fog that had defined my last two years seemed to be lifting. And I started seeing someone new — amazing what that does sometimes.
I had dated multiple people since moving to Seattle, but this felt very different. She had a way of comforting me, even in my most uncomfortable and overwhelmed moments. She helped me a lot. She had her own battles with mental health, and I hope that I helped her in a similar way, although looking back I know I probably didn’t come close.
That’s the brightest time I can remember in my recent past. It felt good to be cared for and have someone else to care about — it felt like we made some dysfunctional team. I saw my problems for what they were, and I was willing to start putting in the work to feel better. My memories from that time are marked by the nice smells of her apartment, and by this random Low Cut High Tops album that I always listened to on the drive to and from her place. I feel the strongest sense of nostalgia, hope, and sadness whenever I listen to it now. A friend recently described music as having a “mournful optimism” and I guess that’s the closest thing I can think of to describe hearing songs from that time. But then maybe music distorts memory even more than pictures and tweets.
Ultimately the relationship didn’t work out. For one thing, we didn’t share any similar interests. She didn’t like loud music, staying up late drinking, or being spontaneous. I think we both became frustrated about how our mental health challenges were hindering each other. There was no shortage of empathy, but at the end of the day, it didn’t feel like we could do much for each other anymore. On the surface I bet we’re both totally different people now, but in a lot of ways I suspect we’re still the same.
What I did get from that relationship was a renewed motivation to combat the things in my life that were making me uncomfortable. I set out to find the source of my neck pain. I started with x-rays with a general practice physician. Then started treatment three times a week at a downtown chiropractic clinic. After a couple months, I wasn’t seeing an improvement. I had insurance through my work, but the co-payments were adding up. I switched to acupuncture and message for a while. Then finally back to a different chiropractor in Eastlake.
By the time the weather was getting colder in the Fall of 2016, I had been singularly focused on combating my chronic neck pain for over half a year with no results and only a diminished bank account to show for it. Every day, the hours of daylight grew shorter, and with them, I started to lose my motivation to be active, to be present, and to be proactive in taking control of my life.
The general election was coming up and I started to find solace online again, slowly sliding myself into a pocket of the internet filled with people who seemed just as miserable as me. I started participating more in the discourse, and using humor to hide my disdain and fear.
After the election result on Nov 8th, I slid a little further. I was worried about myself, the people I cared about, and a lot of people that I didn’t even know. The recent lessons I’d learned made me feel helpless to change anything in my own life, let alone anything about the world around me. I knew that people were going to suffer and die needlessly before their time — as if dying when it is your time isn't scary enough.
I was smug and scarred, and at a loss for what I should do to feel better. I had a lot of anger that I pointed in a lot of different directions.
But then, I really started pointing that anger at myself. I kept doing my job and hanging out with friends, but there is a tangible darkness to the memories from that winter. Even the smiling pictures on Facebook start to give some hints at this time. In one picture at the Diller Room with two co-workers, I’m on the right side of the frame. With the distorting filter, it looks like I’m fading into the background — my eyes are wild.
And the next morning, I had to miss work as I spent the day throwing up in my apartment — that would become somewhat of a trend.
I started getting tattoos during this time. Now I mostly regret them, but I think that was my way of taking back some control. I think it was also a way of sharing outwardly the pain I was feeling on the inside. I went back to the doctor and got more medication, but this time I treated it more recreationally. I got a prescription for Xanax and I would experiment with how much I could take and drink without passing out or losing memory. I wasn’t considering suicide — I’ve always been too scared of dying to do it on purpose — but I stopped caring if I ceased to live, especially if it was painless. I was trying to push my body to a point that it wasn’t supposed to go.
I started repeating the mantra throughout my day that I wished I had never been born. I didn’t want to exist, and it made me so angry that someone else decided that I had to. Nobody asked me.
I broke down constantly. What would happen is that when I let my guard down, it felt like my whole vision of the world and myself would suddenly zoom out and make me feel very vulnerable and small. All of a sudden, I felt trapped in my own life, like a bad dream where the only way out was to die. It was that same death feeling, over and over. Sometimes, it happened in public and I’d burst into tears with friends at a bar in Las Vegas or on the sidewalk in Portland. Mostly though, it happened late at night when I was by myself in my room, too exhausted to protect myself from my own fears.
During that summer of 2017, I went to the Washington Coast with a group of friends. It’s funny because I remember it as one of the best weekends of my life. But at some point, a friend went out of her way to pull me aside and ask if I was OK. I broke down crying because I clearly wasn’t. I was in a dark place, but again, Facebook tells a more conflicting story.
The next year was mostly defined by insecurity and loneliness. My hypochondria was worse than ever. I was in a vicious cycle of acting out in self destructive ways and then later, feeling guilty and paranoid. I obsessed about germs on surfaces, and after every meal I would ruminate about the chances of getting a food borne illness. I clenched my jaw shut and only breathed through my nose every morning on the bus, and looked for potential symptoms in co-workers and acquaintances. These examples are just a few of many — I always found a new way to exhaust myself and divert my attention inward. One of the reasons I think I was so on edge is that part of me wanted to snap back to feeling good just like I had perceivably snapped into feeling so bad five years earlier. And if I could always be healthy and alert, I’d be ready when that opportunity came.
Everything in my body felt heavy and weak — every moment felt like panicked damage control and maintenance for a life that was slowly but surely careening toward some unforeseeable but catastrophic end.
When I wasn’t obsessively ruminating about things that I couldn’t control, I read news articles that made me even more scared of the world. My posts during that time include a few heartbreaking photo essays — a child losing his life to pediatric cancer, a father’s battle with Alzheimer’s. I was craving connection, and I started looking for validation in sex. I would sleep around and then lash out at myself when it felt like they didn’t want me anymore.
I have this bad habit of viewing myself through the lens of how I think others perceive me. In small doses this can be healthy and aid in things like empathy or self-awareness. But too much and you start playing a very unwinnable game with yourself. You start to obsess about how the things you say are coming across, and start to cater your image to whoever you think is most important at any given time. When you feel you haven’t presented yourself well enough, you panic and try to make up for it. I felt the need prove myself to others, like I was worthwhile to have as a friend. I felt ugly, insecure, and small, like nobody could know me because I wasn’t consistent enough to know myself. I lost track of the joy in my relationships and felt profoundly lonely. And most of all, all this thinking just reminded me of plain old death.
It was a long and difficult year.
The start of 2018 saw WSU’s starting quarterback take his own life. Paired with my own ideation, it was difficult to see suicide so close to home, and so closely associated with one of the things in the world that usually brought me joy. Later that year, Anthony Bourdain, someone I looked up to, took his life as well. It occurred to me that if someone so intelligent and traveled can’t take any more of this life, what chance do the rest of us have? In both cases, I scrolled through their photos on the internet, and searched their faces for clues in the passing still shots.
I remember feeling the tangible darkness during that time. And I felt like a burden. I felt like I was casting that darkness onto my friends.
In the summer of 2018, I started to dig myself out. Despite my self-destructive behavior in the previous months, I completed a marathon. I leaned on my friends and more importantly, started to find joy in my relationships again.
I look at my twitter account in the months after, and it takes a lighter turn. I’m mostly affable until things shift during the Brett Kavanaugh Senate hearings. And shortly after, I retweeted two articles: one about an artist not able to write due to depression, and an excerpt from Heavy: exploring what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family and a nation teetering on the brink or moral collapse. After writing this, I’ll never claim to be immune to the effect that events have on us collectively.
I was getting healthier. I started dating someone. I tried to be cognizant that my emotional investment in sports was just a proxy for my other, less tangible worries — I kept a socially distant relationship with college football. I was considering taking a job at my Aunt and Uncle’s vacation resort in West Glacier, MT. It felt like I was making my way through the fog. Even still, during times of exhaustion and worry, I was overwhelmed by the death feeling. I guess maybe everyone is sometimes. And maybe everything we do is for the purpose of avoiding it.
I was doing OK. I decided to take that job in Montana starting in the spring. I still felt the obsessive hypochondria, and was constantly paranoid about getting sick and missing out on my last chances to spend time with friends in Seattle. But the memories I made in those months are among the best of my life. Maybe having an end in sight helped me to embrace my life there. Looking back, it seems pretty silly to have wanted to leave. But I guess it all still wasn’t enough. I’m scared when I realize my version of enough is about as tangible as my recollection of the past.
Avoidance: an action of emptying, vacating, or clearing away
When I moved to Montana, I knew I was fleeing from one set of problems and replacing them with another. I was always honest about that. But I was also looking for something. In a word, I needed to re-prioritize. I’ve always felt that if I could make up my mind and point myself in a specific direction, I could accomplish anything I wanted. That was certainly the goal, especially after the years in Seattle marked with trepidation, aimlessness, and inaction.
As to what I found there, I think it’s still too early to say. Like the other memories from my past, time will tell what the filter will look like for those months.
There aren’t many tweets that I can use to represent that time. For the first time in a half-decade, I wasn't on the internet. I think that was good for me, although I did miss being able to clarify questions that my friends had about Milkshake Duck, or Dat Boi (o shit waddup). As for pictures, I’ve never been good at taking them. Plus, the person who has done the job of documenting my life for the last 8 years is still in Seattle.
I liked getting my hands and clothes dirty. I liked putting my head down to just work. And I liked the opportunity to unapologetically worry only about myself for a stint — although I’m glad I’m better at keeping in touch with my friends now.
I saw a reduction of my chronic pain in Montana. Getting away from the desk job was good. And it felt nice to drive again — the closest town was 20 miles away. Sometimes after work I would drive to town for dinner or groceries. Exhausted, I’d look up and see the cliffs stretching toward the cloudless sky, and I’d imagine large rocks breaking off and crushing my vehicle. I did what I could to keep breathing and move on — those same old death feelings.
It was pretty though.
Collectivism: the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it.
In writing this, I’ve noticed that the times I remember most are the ones that are best documented. Maybe just by existing, the photos themselves influence the past.
We can only look back through the scope of our present. We use nostalgic pondering and collective recaps with friends, and because of that, I fear that our memories are mostly comprised of things that don’t ultimately exist. But then what do I do with those feelings I get when I come across old pictures, songs, and tweets?
We’re coming up on another election this year, and these days no matter how much internet content you’ve consumed, you’re likely painfully aware of the number of people without clean water, preventative healthcare, or economic security. Not to mention, we’re in the throes of a worldwide pandemic. People are taking to Twitter and Facebook to advocate for one another, complain to one another, or just collectively grieve. It won’t stop anytime soon either — we have nothing else to do. I’ve seen people lament that 2020 is the worst year yet, just like I saw in 2017, 2018, and 2019.
The internet is no longer a place I go to escape, and I avoid inundating as much as I used to. Likewise, tweets from some of the old Weird Twitter accounts have ceased. The jokes linger like a eulogy for those who shifted their attention to the material world, or in some cases — it’s been told — took their own lives.
Some simply deactivated and took their words with them when they left. I can imagine their relationship with that site is complicated like mine.
Now I use social media as a stamped marker of time. When I look back at old pictures, I try to remember how I really felt — usually there’s more to the story than the smile on the screen.
I wonder whether the internet’s or my version of the past can be trusted. I wonder whether our collective grief will lead the way towards solving some of the world’s scariest problems — or at least make us better at caring for each other. I wonder what I need to do to be present and start enjoying my life again, even in the face of all my memories and fears.
I could use my best guess to try to answer those questions, but it’s safe to say that I’ve taken up too much of your time already. For now, and until I’m allowed to see you face to face, I’ll just tell you that I don’t know.
