The notifications begin flooding in, and I lie in my bed, my laptop resting atop my belly, half-paralyzed, manically refreshing my Twitter feed, doe-eyed and hypnotized by the seemingly infinite stream of likes and retweets and replies and new followers. I am high off the fact that everyone is looking at me, and I feel powerful. I have the attention of the crowd, and as it turns out, that’s all I’ve ever wanted.Fast-forward to 2016: I am on Twitter for hours and hours and hours every day, so it’s not entirely surprising that I am also lonely and depressed. I am tweeting through it all and I am handsomely rewarded for my social media impulses: My follower count balloons to 10,000 and it just keeps getting bigger. To me, that means I am special and I am doing something right. I’ve successfully capitalized on the internet notoriety I received from my first viral tweet to realize my career ambitions—I am freelance writing for whoever will have me and my Twitter brand is key to my hustle. I date guys who don’t like me back and then get paid by publications like Cosmopolitan and New York Magazine to spill the details of my disastrous love life, among other things. I feel like a legitimate writer, and I am reveling in it, and yet I still feel empty. Even though I panic about the toll my social media compulsion is taking on me, I tweet and I tweet and I tweet some more. I do it because I tell myself I wouldn’t be where I am—eking out a living off writing—if it wasn’t for all my tweeting. It’s not like I get the majority of my work through any connection or secret “in.” Instead, it’s because people see me on Twitter. I feel indebted to the social platform, and unlike the thrill of my first viral tweet, it feels like a burden. I don’t want to admit it, but I am scared."Translating the essence of who you are into a digestible product is a strange way to live, especially when you’re a young adult and your sense of self is in flux. It was never my main intention to peddle my personality for a living, but in the era of social media, the personal brand reigns supreme."
As summer fades into fall, I remain unsure about who I am and who I even want to be, but somehow, I am climbing out of the hole I dug myself into. I go through my old tweets one at a time, deleting hundreds of messages that make me wince with shame and regret upon a second read. At the beginning of this arduous process, I am drenched in self-loathing, but eventually I grow numb to the folly of all the people I’ve been, and even start to feel a little smug about the evolution I’ve undergone over the past three years: I have gone from a suicidally depressed attention junkie to a less suicidal and less depressed person who only likes attention sometimes. Baby steps!"I hate Twitter. I have 79,000 followers and I still fucking hate it. I also still use it constantly. My timeline is a stream of infinite negativity, of horrific news, and everybody yelling at one another, and maybe I’m just getting older, but suddenly I am exhausted by all the cyber-rage. Every day online feels like Gamergate."
That’s life, I guess. All the different versions of me are ascending upward, and I can’t wait to see who makes it to the top, how I converge.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.