Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
Tumblr (a hell pit): You try to serve yourself a baked potato. An angry child runs up and slaps the plate out of your hand. “NIGHTSHADE PLANTS ARE POISONOUS,” the child yells. You are hungry. The child gives you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a kick on the shin.
The fact that a potato is replaced with a different form of potato is what makes that last one so accurate.
I was in a Fanders voice chat today, and a lot of us realized that we felt pressured to perform in the Sanders Sides fandom to fit in. We reblog certain posts because everyone else is reblogging them; we agree with certain opinions because we feel like that’s what people want from us. We feel unable to be ourselves; we feel afraid to open up about our identities beyond generalized labels; and we worry about backlash if we post our genuine ideas, thoughts, content, and opinions.
A lot of us don’t feel good enough to talk to people with relatively larger follower counts due to overlord mentality (Or afraid to talk to anyone really, let’s be real). We’re afraid to share our writing and art, and we don’t feel like our ideas will count because they seem “unpopular.” We feel like we have to participate in drama or call out culture because we don’t want the backlash of going against the status quo. But what was more eye-opening to all of us tonight when discussing all of this was realizing that we all resonate with these feelings so deeply. If a lot of us feel this way, there’s a chance that all of us are performing for each other, when none of us really want to perform in the first place. We all wish we could be ourselves, but we’re too afraid of putting ourselves out there because of the unhealthy patterns of thinking that have prevailed as a part of Internet culture.
Some things I’ve learned in the CBT clinics I’ve been going to regarding anxiety that I thought might be helpful to some.
I need to show that panic disorder one to a lot of people wow
THIS THIS THIS THIS
I’ve never seen a post about social anxiety which includes the bit about being REALLY outgoing in order to mask imperfections, which is EXACTLY what I do. This is a really great overview of the different anxieties and phobias.
Tayla's photography 