Social Media Reflects Back at Me.

My morning anxiety arrives as a pounding headache, a blasting speaker sitting on my chest, plugged into the walls of every room I’ve ever stepped foot in. I wake with the fear that the safest choice is to fall back asleep, that unconsciousness is less dangerous than the mistakes I will inevitably make today. I ask myself when life started feeling like this—like someone was standing at the bottom of a building with a mattress waiting to catch me from the inevitable fall they already placed bets on, with high hopes they’d win. Like a ticking time bomb lodged beneath my ribs—but I can’t remember when the countdown began. All I can do is beg for it to end.

Somewhere along the line, the media stopped being a thing I looked at and started becoming a thing that looked back at me. It watched me closer than I watched myself, studying every breath, every pause, every blink, until I could no longer tell where my body ended, and its glow began, until my chest ached with a rhythm not my own. I don’t remember when this shift happened—when a screen became a mirror, then a judge—but now its presence hums beneath my skin, a quiet electricity I can’t turn off.

Is my heart still powered by blood, or a rectifier converting it on and off?

I wonder if the wires have already threaded themselves through my brain, if I’ve become nothing more than a reflection of what I scroll past—mirroring only the trends I see and becoming a pheromone for the people watching me. No longer knowing the truth behind my personality: what I love, what I laugh at, what truly makes me smile and gleam. I long to touch something unfiltered, unseen, untouched by the glow, but even that desire feels like another broadcast.

Now I am only a screenshot to be taken, a text to be sent.

I whisper to myself that they must know I am trying, that I am running, that I am eating, that I am beautiful, that I am worth something—because if they see me in any other light, even for a moment, then I fear I must not exist at all. Maybe my fear of perception doesn’t begin when I open my eyes, but when I turn on my phone. I must not exist outside of what the internet knows. Wired or wireless, there is something connecting me to every person across the globe. One type into a search engine and one day they may know more about me than I can remember on my own—more than I can account for, more than I can attest. My deepest, darkest secrets; the wrinkles of my mind and how they intertwine; the karma I may still be paying off—no matter how impossible it truly is. My deepest fear is that it’s all laid out somewhere on the deep, dark web. That they know. And they are not easy to forgive. That they see me for all I’ve ever been.

I can’t tell if we’re all caught in the same pull of eyes and screens, or if mine just spins faster. If this fear is something we share, or if it lives only in me. I feel it pressing in every time I reach for my phone, every time I step outside, every time I imagine someone, anywhere, noticing me. I don’t remember mornings before the hum, when I woke to my own breath instead of notifications. Those mornings feel like someone else’s memory.

Is this the curse of a generation? Or is it specific to me?