“Sometimes I complain about social media” is a comic I made about what I really mean when I say “I hate social media”. Because, I don’t ACTUALLY hate it. If you don’t wanna read the comic, you can listen/watch it in the video posted above! If you’d like to read it, it’s posted below. As well, after the comic, I have some more thoughts I’ve written out.

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Here’s the thing… this seems like it’s a dramatic story. It is- I was a dramatic kid. I still am. I romanticized everything way too much and I let my imagination get carried away. I was a self proclaimed Emo kid and I liked it. That being said, this is one of those sign-post events that I look back on, realizing that it’s an important moment. It forever changed my understanding of what is ‘real’ when it happens online (and keep in mind, this was right as social media was beginning to exist- so I think it was a bit more common to have socially inexperienced people read too much into harmless online interaction, right? It’s not like that happens to people anymore, right? RIGHT?).

All at once I had my eyes opened to how naive I was being, and how it wasn’t going to work moving forward. There are worse ways a person can have this realization, so I’m thankful for that.

I’m also thankful for how my life ended up panning out. WAY BETTER than anything I would have imagined scrolling through a MySpace profile.

If you enjoyed this comic/video/post, please share it with your friends! And, connected to my earlier post about how weird storytelling is, just keep in mind that this is an editorialized version of my story, written for maximum impact. There are so many details left out on purpose, and I’ve composed it in such a way that it hopefully feels jarring in the end (as jarring as it felt for me at the time). This is a real thing that happened to me, and it’s a real story that I’m telling you- but it’s my incredibly one-sided perspective.

One last important thing to note: I firmly believe the only person in the wrong in this comic was me, and I made this comic because every time a new social media comes into existence (I’m looking at YOU, threads!) I get a nostalgic twinge of excitement at how fun social media can be. It might just be because I’m an ‘elder millennial’ and can remember when social media didn’t’ exist, but I wanted to write a comic that would remind me of the first time I realized that Social Media is only as good as we make it, and we probably shouldn’t make too much of it.