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DEAR SOCIAL MEDIA

It is somewhat strange that I am writing you a letter, when I actually find you to be really boring. Don’t be totally offended: To be honest, I feel like that about the whole digital world. I am part of the last generation that will ever remember what it was like not to have the Internet, and as a result. I will always be a bit nostalgic for the analog world (after all, I learned what fellatio was by looking it up in the encyclopedia). I prefer the kind of creativity that comes from hands, not from fingertips.

When I was growing up, all my photos were printed. We’d snap a picture, and then not see it for weeks or months, usually not until we were in one place long enough for me to get my film developed.

The only people who ever saw these photos were the people I decided to share them with, my friends and family. If there was a photo I hated, I did not have to show it to anyone. If something was really bad, I just tore it up, threw it in the bin, and no one ever knew it existed. None of this bullshit of pulling something out of the trash or finding it again after it’s been supposedly “destroyed.” I still have boxes and boxes of photographs in my apartment, and while I always have a laugh whenever I take them out to look through them, I’m very protective of them, because they represent the only private life I’ve got.

With digital, that privilege is gone, and this terrifies me.

Send a sexy selfie via text? It can go viral. Post something on social media, and even if you decide to delete it three seconds later, someone could already have taken a screen grab. We live in a world where once you put something out there, it’s out there! There’s no going back, and if that sounds ominous, it’s because it is! I don’t use Snapchat, because I don’t really believe it disappears—when I post something, once it’s up, it’s up. Even if it’s something that will put me in a world of pain—like tweeting at Lady Gaga to eat my shit—I own it rather than try to pretend it didn’t happen and issue some fake-ass apology.

Social media is like picking your nose in the car and eating it: You think you’re all alone and no one’s watching, but everyone can see you! All those nasty comments you left on the page of someone you don’t even know? They can be traced back to you. People like to pretend that online life and real life are two separate things. Maybe that was true back when the Internet was brand-new, but now they’re one and the same. Anything you post online can be found with just a few clicks by someone who knows what they’re doing.

That’s why it blows my mind that people are so ruthless with celebrities—putting aside the fact that, contrary to popular belief, famous people are real people with real feelings, the vile shit you spew online can easily be traced back to you. You’re not hiding.

What’s more, it doesn’t make the celebrity look bad, it makes you look bad. On any given week, I’ll have random strangers tell me to fuck myself, kill myself, lose some weight, gain some weight, and that I’m a whore. Nine times out of ten, I don’t pay attention to these kinds of comments and don’t click on the profiles to see who wrote them. Every once in a while, though, something will hit in just the right place, and I get sad about it. The comments don’t affect me personally—at this point in my life, being called fat doesn’t have much of an effect—but I’m sad for the person who wrote it and for humanity in general. I once got a series of particularly nasty comments telling me I should just go kill myself. When I finally clicked through to see the person writing them—which I never do unless I think someone might actually be dangerous and wish me real harm—the cunt’s Instagram bio read “Proud mother and grandmother” and listed all the charities she worked with!

If you’re writing horrible, hateful things to someone you don’t even know, something must be wrong in your life. There is no way you are happy, healthy, or fulfilled. If you were, you wouldn’t have time to do these kinds of things, and what’s more—you wouldn’t want to!

Social media teaches us that we must judge or be judged, so it’s no wonder that young women feel so much pressure to be perfect and that their value lies in their looks. When I posted about amfAR after attending their generationCURE benefit, I was shocked to see that the message about HIV/AIDS research had been overshadowed by commenters talking about . . . my hair.

I’ll often get people telling me to lose weight and gain weight in the comments on the same photo. “I liked her better when she was skinny,” someone will comment, while someone else writes, “Fat Kelly is my fav.” It all makes me want to bang my head (and my haircut that apparently no one likes) against the wall, but instead I just sign off.

I screwed up a lot in the early days of social media, because I was still trying to understand it and figure it out. Since then, there have been other moments—not lapses or fuck-ups, but intentional moments—in which my need to protect either myself or my family have trumped my need to obey my own social media etiquette. In these moments, I try not to judge myself because I am human and no matter what I believe, I will always—always—follow my instinct to first and foremost protect my family.

On a page or screen, words are just in black and white. They can be easily misinterpreted, and this creates so much aggression and anger. I have said things I shouldn’t have, and too often I responded to comments, thinking I could squash the negativity when in reality I was giving people what they wanted—attention—and throwing more fuel on a fire that did not deserve my time in the first place.

I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it was that people wanted to see on my social media, and the only conclusion that I came to was that I have no clue. You can’t make everyone happy, nor can you predict what people like, because everyone has a different opinion and different tastes. What I think will get the most likes often turns out to be stuff no one else cares about, and vice versa.

The only thing I can do is be true to myself and think about what I post before I post it. I try to represent myself as honestly as possible, while most people put a lot of time and effort into constructing their social media presence to be the person they wish they were. We all live in a filtered world—not just in Hollywood but everywhere. People spend a lot of time editing and filtering their lives on social media so they always look good. Is that really you on your Instagram, or is that the person you wish you were? If you only ever acknowledge your best side, eventually you’re going to be half a person.

My Instagram consists mostly of pictures of me in gym clothes, or doing something stupid (like getting locked in my own bathroom). You will just as easily see me on a red carpet as you will in the back garden, snail hunting with my niece. I never made a conscious decision to do this; it just happened because those are the moments that make me different and make me who I am. And of course, I may put a filter on a photo here and there, but I’m not into manipulating my face, since everyone knows what I fucking look like. Other than my vagina, there’s not a lot of me that the world hasn’t seen, so trying to pretend to be something I’m not would be a big waste of time.

When people start talking about social media—who liked their post on Instagram, who said what on Twitter—I zone out. I might as well be a Peanuts character listening to a grown-up talk: “Wawawawah, wawawawah, wawawawah.” It is just noise and I do not care, but it scares me how much other people do. I do not think that is normal. It is not something worth wasting your emotions on. If you are looking for something to be angry about, put your phone down and look up. There are plenty of things in this world into which you can channel your anger to turn it into something positive.

Love,

Kelly O