A Little Bit About My Internet Identity
if i didn't try to become a journalist, would i like the internet more?
i’ve spent the last two-ish years writing with deadlines on the horizon (hint: journalism). initially, it was terrifying. i still remember one of my first evenings at work: it was a little after 7.30 pm, almost time to log out, everyone was packing up when the news cycle hit. a certain Supreme Court verdict had come in and my editor immediately ordered us to put out a ‘quick’ news copy. being the youngest/fresher in the team, the ‘quick’ news copy became my responsibility even as everyone else was prepping to head home. in a state of internal panic, i somehow churned out the 500-word copy in 45 minutes. there wasn’t any time to think or breathe. i wrote, copy-checked, published, shared, and walked out. i remember feeling incredibly overwhelmed and frustrated in the moment but when i walked out of the office that evening, it wasn’t so bad. i felt triumphant and confident about not getting into print and keeping up with the times by choosing digital. life was generally going well and i knew when to acknowledge that.
but that high didn’t last long. that incident took place around june-july 2018. less than three years later, i’m no longer living a life governed by the news cycle and internet. i don’t mean to sound like a seasoned journalist because i wasn’t remotely moving in that direction but i think, creating journalistic content has been life-altering in such unexpected ways. for starters, i hate the internet now.
Internet Was Fun, And Then It Wasn’t
internet used to be fun. once upon a time, we all used to tweet lyrics, share heavily filtered and not-so-aesthetic photos of our lives on Instagram, and wish each other HBD on facebook. i used to write angsty poems on an ugly blogspot domain and have obnoxious conversations with my friends by writing messages on their very public facebook walls. i also had a phase where i was obsessed with selena gomez and all my facebook display pictures were of her. my first introduction to taylor swift was when a school batchmate, with a taylor swift facebook display picture, sent me a friend request.
like i said, the internet used to be a lot of fun and now it’s not. for me and everyone else in the world. and while i am aware of the ongoing evolving discourse around the fall of the internet, i sometimes wonder if i would hate the internet less if i hadn’t completely shoved myself into the digital space as a journalist.
Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror Makes Some Good Points
so much is constantly being said and written about identity, discourse, and activism on the internet. in Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino refers to the internet as “this feverish, electric, unlivable hell” and i can’t help but agree. a few years ago, i changed my Twitter name to ‘cyberspace garbage’ — it just felt so honest, and still kinda does. sometime in 2020, i considered changing the name back to my own because i was writing all these opinionated reviews and articles on the internet. i felt an invisible pressure to take my online identity more seriously because people read my stories and often, even interacted with me. did the interaction and validation add depth and legitimacy to my personality? certainly felt like it.
in mid-2020, when the sushant singh rajput suicide circus was playing out in the indian media, i was one of the many people commenting on it. tons of people interacted and engaged with my stories. and it made me feel pretty good. but, when i look back, i’m not so sure. in Trick Mirror, Tolentino also writes about how, having an opinion on the internet is also considered an action. when i read that, it reminded me of my father who was never too enthusiastic about my journalism aspirations. he would always argue that writing about something makes no difference, that words cannot be equated with action. as a poet/writer/wannabe journalist, i vehemently disagreed. but lately, i’ve become softer on that stance.
so, apart from feeling like a directionless fraud, i also started to notice something else — journalists seemed to become an extension of their work. and they did this with pride. in all honesty, there’s a lot to gain from it: clout, connections, opportunities, identity, etc. in theory, i aspired to follow a similar path but for some reason i was never able to. penning my thoughts everyday was more exhausting than i can ever truly comprehend or explain. when i wasn’t writing, i was scrolling on the internet, looking for ideas and pitches and perspectives, absorbing content every vacant second of the day, which left me with no time to actually unwind. on my alternate weekends off, i would partially detach from the internet and news, only to feel that familiar sunday evening guilt creep in later. i felt guilty every time i didn’t check my phone for more than a couple of hours. so between the writing, surfing, and guilt-tripping, i was left feeling fully saturated and fatigued.
recently, i’ve been watching The Bold Type on Netflix and even though the show is not an accurate representation of what the magazine/publishing/journalism world is all about, it still gets some things right. one of the characters, Kat, is constantly reminded that her personal social media is an extension of the magazine she works at and she needs to keep that in mind. another character, Jane, is groomed to milk her personal life for content that is published and lives in print/on the internet forever. these are very real aspects of working in that industry. once the internet stops being all memes and fun, there’s really no going back.
obviously, i wasn’t alone in this struggle but i didn’t realise this until i ended up discussing it with some of my friends and colleagues. turns out, they were as burnt out and fatigued as i was. the internet wasn’t fun for any of us.
Influencer With An Audience of None
this one time i was on call with a friend. he’d only known me for 3-4 months at the time but he said something that really surprised me. he said something about how i don’t seem like the kind of person who would be comfortable with too much of my life being in the public domain. i found the observation to be rather strange and very presumptuous, even though i didn’t express that in the moment. in my head, i thought i was the exact opposite. of course, i was, by no account, an influencer but i’ve always thought myself to be pretty ‘out there’ on the internet. i have spent close to 10 years publically documenting myself in various ways across various platforms on the internet. i might not have a big audience but that has never discouraged me from expressing. while growing up, i always felt like people around me were constantly discouraging me from expressing myself online and that fuelled my teenage purposeless fire even more. but now, i think i feel differently. and i’m thinking maybe that friend is right. i just don’t know if that’s been me all along or if this withdrawal is a product of the last two years of my life.
i’ve abandoned my previous Wordpress blog and now only vent/write/rant on Substack, — which, though public still, feels a lot more intimate. i’m not easily discoverable here, and i’ve only shared the link with a handful of close friends. i have, of course, shared it on Twitter but that’s also a platform i’m slowly stepping away from so it hardly counts because the lack of engagement automatically makes me less discoverable. i now have two private finstas and, lately, i’ve been feeling more comfortable expressing with the limited audience on those accounts.
i can’t say i’m still not performing. i very much am. all the internet-related reading and contemplating that i do has made me realise one solid fact — that performing is second nature to me now. i am still performing on my finstas, even when i don’t have an audience at all. so putting out a curated version of myself isn’t something i struggle with. rather, i struggle with how i can’t control who has the power to perceive my performance. turns out, i don’t want to be perceived by anyone and everyone. in fact, i’ve been wanting to make my main Instagram private for so long but i have a certain inexplicable guilt associated with it that’s stopping me. and i just can’t seem to make sense of it.
in the past two years, every time i’ve been romantically/sexually involved with a guy, the conversation has inevitably led to them wanting to read my stuff. which is fairly natural. this happened when i was writing angsty poems and blogs in school as well. but back then, it didn’t make me feel as uncomfortable because i don’t think i took myself seriously. which is natural. i’m obviously going to be more cautious and thoughtful now than i was at 15. DUH. but when writing wasn’t my day job, things were different because i could choose what i shared on the internet. on the contrary, once you have a boss, things aren’t that simple anymore.
(also this is not to say i don’t feel v v special when a person wants to read my writing because i love validation as much as the next person. but it’s more complicated than that for sure.)
internet can still be fun, though. i recently went through my Instagram stories archive and realised that in march 2020 i shared something on my story every single day because i just wanted to show up on my crush’s Instagram. reels are mind-numbing and dumb but, with a pandemic outside your window, sometimes reels are just what i need. twitter is still loud, chaotic, and toxic, but i enjoy having a void to dump my dumb thoughts in every once in a while. and substack? i come here to feel like i’m 13 and just discovering the life-changing concept of blogging.
so, ya it’s not all bad and maybe if things had gone differently, it could have been better.