I have no idea who I am anymore and TikTok knows it
Identity is a fickle thing, prone to impetuous retreat like a second-guessing tide. You can feel like you know yourself, find confidence in a foundation of self built atop memory and personality traits that feel true, resonant, and deeply held and then, nudged by little more than a stiff breeze or a gaze too long held, find that feeling disintegrate in your hands like cotton candy in water.
I think we've all had crises of identity over the last eleven months. If anyone out there has not, feel free to get in touch - I've enjoyed more than my share and would be more than glad to spread the love. But I'd be surprised if that were the case, precisely because this past almost-year seems to have been laboratory-designed to undermine and erode any concretized sense of self any of us might have had.
No word can better encapsulate the COVID era than loss. Loss has been all around us, like that terrible song from Love Actually, in places both seen and unseen. The dismantling of any lingering membrane between work and home? Most surely a loss. The societal reckoning (at least for some; many had long ago abandoned naivete or never even had the choice to begin with) with a nation irrevocably drawn along racial lines, in ways insidious and not? A loss of innocence for too many, who should have already known. And of course, the most visible, undeniable losses of all - 500,000+ lives robbed, millions of jobs evaporated, human connection now only a figment of memory. These losses have unfolded before our very eyes and they have been documented with a morbid level of precision; think pieces galore, hourly-updated trackers, new forms of language ('unprecedented times,' 'the new normal,' 'restoring the soul of America' and so on and so forth until all you can recognize is the ambiguously sinister backdrop to a commercial that isn't itself sure what it's selling) etc. Loss is being documented right now, before your very eyes. Inevitably, this meticulous record keeping has been accompanied by a societal commodification of loss. Reminders to cut yourself some slack are always tied to assurances that dwindling productivity, abandoned physical fitness, horrific posture, diminished romantic prospects etc. are all to be expected in this difficult moment, encouraged even. It is implied quietly or even said overtly that now is your time to revel in these traditionally stigmatized forms of loss, that you can eat whatever you wanted or spend all day watching television and that you should, urgently, because who knows how much longer until we are no longer in a state of surrender?
I am not convinced that this accommodation of loss is deserving of condemnation. Perhaps it is the only barrier keeping us from folding inwards upon ourselves, like stress-induced origami. But I am convinced that we spend too much time talking about the wrong forms of loss. The absence of a six-pack or the inability to maintain steady attention on a good book - cause for concern, of course, but a bit superficial, no? This pandemic is nearly blowing out the candles on its first year. I think it's time we talk about the loss that lurks a little deeper, the kind of loss that has consumed almost everyone I know and yet no one is willing to bring into the open.
No one really knows who they are anymore.
Someone important to me asked recently about how much time I spend on TikTok (which, like many, I only began using in earnest several months into the pandemic) and whether or not their ingenious, serotonin-dispensing algorithm was working on me. For those of you unacquainted with the app that has been deemed simultaneously a Chinese security threat and the future of media, the way it operates is rather simple. Users record videos, often of them dancing along to music or participating in a trend - in a brilliant innovation, creators can make videos using shared audio tracks, allowing for sounds to both provide the basis of what goes viral and offer a repository to search for similarly themed videos - and viewers like me watch along, often for hours at a time. TikTok tracks which videos you like and which you don't, providing cultivated recommendations that grow increasingly specific the more you interact with the app. When people talk about the 'algorithm' in relation to TikTok, this is what they mean. As is the case within most wide-reaching Internet communities (Reddit and Twitter come to mind), TikTok boasts some pretty formidable subgroups. Just as there exists 'royal family twitter' and 'mushroom foraging twitter' and subreddits for all the same - self-selecting communities grouped around a shared milieu or interest or a common geographical placing - TikTok has found itself similarly demarcated. Identity - how one perceives oneself, coupled with its inseparable dance partner, how one seeks to be perceived - is the essence of TikTok.
My TikTok algorithm is broken. When I go on TikTok - typically for anywhere from about 1-2 hours a day and often early in the morning, when I've woken hours before my alarm but cannot be motivated to enter the waking world beyond the complacent comfort of my phone - what awaits me is chaos. My recommendations are all over the place. I'm greeted first by a midwestern family documenting their trip to Costco, next by a lesbian Norwegian teenager describing her coming out experience, then by a soccer highlight video, then by a video of a bunch of longshoremen singing Gaelic work songs, and so on. Clearly, my algorithm is shattered. The reason for why isn't particularly complicated. The algorithm can only know you as much as you allow it to know you - by liking videos, commenting, making your own etc., it learns your tastes and predilections and adjusts accordingly. Here's the problem: I hardly know myself anymore.
I should stop using TikTok. The app makes me sad. It's a stark reminder of a year spent in vast quantities alone with hardly anything to show for it. A reminder of a year of chaos collectively felt but individually experienced. A whole year spent working tirelessly and without boundaries from home resulted in what? Negligible advancement, tangible stagnation, and barely any new skills. A year of friendships maintained, at best, but hardly deepened. Hundreds of hours of internal panic, racing thoughts, crises of self-doubt - all banished deep within for fear of burdening anyone else or, even worse, forgotten because this pandemic has a cruel, sickly grasp on already-slippery memory. This has been a harder year than any I have ever lived, save one, and for what? I already remember so little of it. A TikTok as directionless as it is frantic, its content both entertaining and inherently fleeting? That resonates.
I like it when my TikTok is haphazard and jarring. It makes sense. It's one of the few things that does make sense. Where life a year ago had variety and personal growth and a sense of forward momentum, today there's paralysis, mundanity fraught with risk, and internal displacement. As my fucked up TikTok churns out videos that contradict themselves in quick succession, it offers a window into that feeling, providing both a visceral illustration of how so many things that once felt disciplined now feel ripe with perverse confusion and a somewhat less-useful reminder that that external disorder matches the state of play within.
In the interest of both an abrupt, semi-happy conclusion and telling the truth, I should admit that I find myself going on TikTok a little less now than I did a few months ago. Maybe it's the warmth in the air; maybe I've just hit my limit of 17 year olds' off-beat dance challenges. I think it's more than that. As I spend less time scrolling and more time writing or nervously considering whether or not visiting that gallery is an act of great societal irresponsibility, I can't help but feel myself beginning to rise from a dark, deep sleep.
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This has been a particularly morose post. While I'm sorry, it was on purpose. Things are seemingly on the verge of, finally, getting better. Biden announced last week that there should be enough vaccines to innoculate all of America by May (although we'll see how swimmingly distribution goes). The CDC announced this morning that vaccinated people can see non-vaccinated, low-risk people unmasked indoors. Articles are starting to pop up with headlines like 'How Great Could This Summer Really Be?' (short answer: no one really knows). Hope seems to be in the air, filtered through doubly-applied N95s.
I'm sure summer will bring joy and freedom. With that joy will come the impulse to forget the malignancies of this last year and for the sake of getting up and getting on, I understand why most will indulge that impulse. I'm sure I'll do the same, in as many ways as I can. But I also know that this last year, as horrific and unpleasant and deeply boring as it has been, has been a year of my life. While I struggle to place this year within a larger context and narrative of who I am, I know it has a role to play and even more than that, I know that to fail to remember this year, with all its heightened heart-rates and lowered libidos and crises of confidence, is worse than to live it again. As things get better and people get the vaccine and smiles wash across relieved faces, I don't want to forget the depths of this year. I hope I'll go back to my TikTok, albeit with a little less regularity, and through its onslaught of frenetic noise and color, be reminded of a year of dismantling and haziness that was as real as the years that came before and after.
All of our identities are tied up in this casualty of a year - any attempt to deny that is an attempt to deny ourselves. And we have too much of ourselves still left to lose.