I'm afraid of getting better

On self-sabotage and FOMO

Feb 26, 2024

This week’s blog was not easy to write. I’ve sat down at least seven times in the last couple of weeks trying to come up with something to say. Not for lack of ideas. The issue is that, since my last post, I have been thinking a lot about the past. I have stayed up until 2 AM thinking about people no longer in my life and wondering about what-ifs. I didn’t take my advice. Instead, I fell into this rabbit hole of self-sabotage.

For the last ten years, I have struggled with mental health issues. I’ve seen therapists since I was fourteen, and it never seemed to help. At that age, I spent a lot of time online unsupervised, especially on Tumblr. A website where I consumed content that was not appropriate for my age:bloody wrists, existentialist poetry, romanticization of eating disorders, soft porn.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but spending so much time on this app was damaging to my mental well-being. I was comparing myself, a fourteen-year-old girl from Colombia, to upper-middle-class, pale, thin, and blonde girls from the United States. I was nothing like them. I was short, brown, overweight, and low-middle class. I hated everything about myself.

The main issue with Tumblr was not that I was comparing myself to other girls. I also thought I would be a more interesting individual if I suffered from a mental illness. It wasn’t until 2022 that I decided to take my mental health seriously. After much introspection, I realized that social media perpetuates this type of behavior in young people.

Every day, as I scroll through TikTok and Instagram, I get the feeling that I need to be more pretty, thinner, smarter, and more cultured. Not only do I have to be all of this, but I also have to have a plethora of past traumatic events that have shaped me into an “interesting” person. The list of lacking qualities grows every day, and even though I have developed a set of skills through therapy that help me manage these emotions, I keep hitting the same wall. Every time I feel myself getting better and being able to manage my emotions in non-threatening ways for my well-being, I do something to set me back to my old self, someone who copes with pain in unhealthy ways.

I spend an absurd amount of time on social media, and I have noticed that a sense of belonging in the digital age feels almost impossible to achieve. There is always someone doing better than you, but instead of being happy for other people’s success, we not only compare ourselves to them, we mock them for doing well.

On this TikTok, a creator shares with their audience (probably Gen-Z), “I feel like maybe a “mentally healthy” person is this unachievable concept that big pharma created.” And people in the comments agreed with her.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

In the digital world, being stable is not relatable or rewarded. Studies show that social media has a reinforcing nature. Using it activates the brain’s reward center by releasing dopamine, a “feel-good chemical” linked to pleasurable activities such as sex, food, and social interaction. Therefore, getting thousands of likes on a video sharing your mental and emotional struggles makes you feel good. It validates you.

But people don’t want to see you getting better after struggling, being “stable” is boring. Worse, it is not relatable. Being mentally stable on the internet is not the norm right now. If you share on social media having happily married parents who cared for you, loved you, and paid for your school tuition, you lack "spice.” If you self-regulate in healthy ways and have a healthy attachment style, you are not fun to be around.

Let’s use Emma Chamberlain as an example to show how sharing one’s difficulties can get us popularity, but if that same individual finds stability in their life, they’re faced with backlash. For the longest time, Emma was the internet’s best friend. Videos of her laying in bed, making coffee, and running errands—mundane tasks—got millions of views, literally.

Her honesty and “relatability” made her beloved among Gen-Z, and soon her popularity helped her become one of the youngest content creators to be an ambassador for luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Cartier. She went from being a YouTuber to being invited to the Met Gala to interview celebrities. As she got more famous, the quality that made her famous among young people—being relatable—no longer applied to her, because most 22-year-old women don’t have access to her lifestyle. Since then, her followers have stated that she has changed and that she is not as fun to watch as she once was.

In an interview with The New York Times, Emma said, “I started YouTube during a time in my life when I was depressed, like severely depressed. It gave me a distraction and something to put my energy toward. But it got to a point where my depression came back, and the reason was because my whole life was on the internet. I felt so exposed. I felt so much pressure, and I was scared.”

For a long period, YouTube was a platform where she felt heard and understood, but as her popularity grew, Emma started to feel like her life lacked privacy and that she no longer had anything exciting or interesting to say. The response from people to her suddenly leaving YouTube was interesting. In the same interview, she shared that she has been through phases where people were like, “We lost her. There’s no way she’s going to continue to be relatable.”

Today, she posts on YouTube only occasionally, and her videos are more laid-back and cinematic.

It made me wonder: Why do we want young people to be miserable? Are we so threatened by other people’s success and happiness that we want them to be depressed forever? Why is it that we need to relate to the lives of people we watch on the internet?

People on social media are now more than ever sharing extremely personal things and intimate moments, posting story-time videos about how they got cheated on or about one of their relatives passing, hoping that it gets them thousands of likes and therefore validation.

Victoria Halina in The Psychology of Social Media — Why We Feel the Need to Share says, “Individuals can choose the information that they post, and keeping up a certain online identity increases self-esteem but can mask our true personas. For the narcissist, this feeds into the need to be admired, and the more reception a post receives, the more is fed into this type of behavior. For the anxious, online interactions can translate into real-life interaction, and feed into the anxious feeling of whether people like them or not, corresponding with what kind of reception online posts receive.”

The lines between the real and digital worlds are blurring quickly, especially since the pandemic. Today, young people are very attentive to the attention they get on social media. We care about how many followers, comments, and likes we have, which is highly affecting our mental well-being. I know for certain that it’s affecting mine.

Considering this, it makes sense that, for the longest time, I feared getting better. Healing posed a threat to what I thought was “normal.” I had to challenge my beliefs and develop a new sense of normal (even if it wasn’t relatable to people my age) for me to get to the place I am today.

Life is vast and multifaceted, and I’m done self-sabotaging my recovery just so I can relate to people online. I will probably, from time to time, engage in self-deprecating talk and laugh about people sharing their traumatic events on social media. I recently laughed my ass off watching the TikTok of that one girl who shared how her dad left her family to become a break dancer. But it is safe to say I am no longer as afraid of getting better as I once was. There is much more to life than people finding me interesting or "relatable.”

If you ever felt similar, let me know in the comments below. I’d love to start a conversation.

I'm afraid of getting better

On self-sabotage and FOMO

Love,

Luisa

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