Januariad

The girl with the blog was a very sad girl. It wasn’t always that way. In the beginning she started a blog to write about bicycles. But soon she began to write bits about herself into the posts about bicycles and soon after that the posts she made to the blog were posts about herself with bits about bicycles. It appeared to the girl that her readers were more responsive when she posted details about her own state of mind than when she posted about nice bicycles she had seen on the street. She didn’t know this at the time, but the heartfelt comments that followed any outpouring of emotions were an unconscious attempt by the sad bloggers to pull a new sad blogger into their fold.

This gentle and pervasive encouragement dissuaded the girl from writing about bicycles, which made her happy, towards writing about her inner feelings, which made her sad. This is not to say that all of her inner feelings were sad. She, like most people, was a mixture of both sad and happy emotions. She had some close friends in real life, and when spending time with those friends was generally distracted from darker parts of her brain. When alone, her thoughts naturally turned to those issues that had been put aside during the entertainment of company. Before she started to sad-blog she would turn over these thoughts, process them, and put them aside. If they aggravated her sufficiently she would verbalise them to a friend or family. ‘I am never going to find a career I could enjoy!’ she might exclaim, but only if the sad thoughts had become very powerful. Her friend of family would discuss her sad thoughts in an exchange that might take seconds or might take hours, chipping away at them with selective logic until the girl felt better again.

The blog offered a degree of anonymity and separation that removed the social shame of negative thoughts. There was no need for the slow build that prefaced a vent to a friend. As soon as the bad thought entered her head, it could be thrown out relatively painlessly, and the soothing responses and replies from her followers would provide relief for a pain that had barely registered at all. Soon the process became more about the salve than the pain. It was the salve the girl went in search of, and the pain that elicited it became almost an excuse.

Arriving at this state required some changes in her nature and her writing. The content of her blog was much shaped by the response she received to her posts. When no one was interested in the bike posts, she almost unthinkingly gave them up. She was still interested in bikes, but observing a nice bicycle no longer reminded her of her blog. When she began to vent her feelings, people “liked” her posts more. Whereas in the past a nice bicycles would have been stored away for future posts, she now found herself drawing a mental box around particularly emotional experiences with a mind to writing about them. ‘This would suit the blog,’ her mind said.

While using her blog as a personal outlet did not seem a warping factor in itself, soon the girl began to notice that her happier posts did not receive as much attention as her sadder posts. I say she “noticed,” but it’s not likely she ever verbalised it to herself. She would simply have grown ephemerally aware that a breathless description of her delight dancing at a gig one night did not elicit the same response from her followers as a heartrending account of her bi-monthly panic attacks.

Already trained by the blogging software to chase the approval given by her followers through “likes” and replies, the girl altered her writing style to achieve the best results. Firstly this meant abandoning non-emotional writing. The next stage was dropping overly positive emotional writing. Her sad posts had a higher yield. Again, none of this was intellectualised, it was more a subconscious bid for approval. The requirement of writing primarily sad posts made the girl view her life in sad terms. Her unhappiness was amplified, her restorative and positive experiences were pushed aside as flukes or irrelevant. What began as a writing persona soon had profound effects on how she experienced both the small and large parts of her existence.

The sadder her posts became, the greater her following grew, the more virtual hugs she received, the more sad colon faces were given her, and the more she was assured, in superficial and vague terms, by people who didn’t know her, that she was special. After she had spiraled downwards sufficiently, this feedback began to feel like one of the few positive aspects of her life. The girl with the blog was a very sad girl.

But wait! The story has a happy ending. The girl lost her job. She became very poor and had to get a job in a newsagent. She no longer sat at a computer all day. She became so poor that she couldn’t pay for her internet connection, and only used the Internet in coffee shops. She became too poor for coffee. After three months away from her blog, her life rebalanced. The human brain can do that. Her friends became once again important. Her happiness was amplified. Her sadness was herded. None of the sad bloggers missed her.