Social Media and Optimism

Scenario one: you wake up and go online, reading the feed for your friends. You feel a slight glow over your body as the sun warms your part of the earth. You feel inspired. You read the updates on your favorite blogs and newsfeeds, finding cool bits here and there, and there it is: an article with the keywords that pull at your heart strings, on your most beloved website, with positive comments gushing down a never ending window scroll. You post it, so all your friends can see. You add a comment to go along with the post, personalizing it. Your friends see your post, experience the same wave of excitement and then share it with their friends, too. Your network is so wide that this causes a chain reaction of positivity, excitement, and inspiration. Little by little, the world is changed.

Scenario two: you wake up and hate yourself. Hate yourself because you drank and ate last night as if you hated yourself. Everything bad has carried over to today. Everything good, a distant memory. Why? You don't know. You go online. You see pictures of last night posted on the feed. You start to moan in embarrassment. But then, that's part of the fun. You start to chuckle, and eventually, you comment on an especially terrible picture of you taking off your shirt, your midriff is pale and hairy, your head, covered in the shirt. That's me, you write. In case anyone had trouble tagging you. You get up, and you heat up a can of tomato soup. You make toast. Coffee. You're late for work. You leave your tomato soup to congeal on the kitchen table, your coffee you carry with you, and your wallet is in your other pair of pants hanging on the door knob of your bed room. Just another morning.

Scenario three: you wake up surprised you're still alive, shivering. Last night you texted all your friends with the message, I'm giving up on everything. Nobody replied. You can't blame them. For the past year or so, you've been on a destructive journey justified only if you were a rock star. You are not a rock star. You are nobody. You check your phone, and see that someone did reply. It's your mom. She asks if everything is okay. By which she means: are you applying to grad school, or not? You drank. You smoked. The combination of the two usually works out to a balance of exuberant darkness. Last night, it didn't work out. You drank more than you smoked. You found a bottle of old vicodin from a root canal a few years ago. You wondered if they're still good. They were. You went out. Showed up at a party you were planning on never attending. There was a small group of people downstairs doing coke. They welcomed you. You spent the night staring at the shoulder of a girl sitting next to you. You went home. Passed out in the tub with all your clothes on. You woke up shivering. You go online. You think about posting something on your personal blog because you can't stand the sight of the social network, the optimism feed. Like birds you think. Bird feed. Twittering about. You cry. You wonder, why am I so angry? You wonder, who can I talk to? You wonder, how can I be more optimistic?