CHAPTER 9
The Picture
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
—Montesquieu
Lorraine Sullivan followed the social media feeds of her own kids as well as those of their friends. All the parents did. Free access, and thus free insight, into the thoughts and actions of the young people around them: what a gift and a reassurance, to be able to flip open her iPad or iPhone and know where the person she loved was, to know they were safe for at least another day.
The night of January 17, 2014, Emma Sullivan had just returned to Boston College for her second semester. Back in Allendale, Lorraine scrolled through feeds on her iPad and was stopped cold by the newest image posted by Maddy. She stared at the picture, absorbed it, allowed the energy of it to radiate through the screen. Exactly what was Maddy trying to say? A minute later, Lorraine returned to scrolling, but the aftertaste remained: That photo is eerie. The image made Maddy seem nostalgic for a time and place she had never seen. And if this was true, if she was, how would she ever stifle that longing?
This wasn’t the first time an outsider, a parent, had felt that way about Maddy’s social feed. Hers were more cryptic than the posts of other kids, more dependent on quotes, and views from high places; the images conveyed the feeling that Maddy was trying to say something, without knowing exactly how or what it was. What drifted from the screen was a kind of yearning, a wandering energy—something crucial had been lost, but not quite found.
A searching energy permeates almost every young person’s social media. After all, what is a social feed if not a journal, but in digital, visual form? Perhaps the most important distinguishing feature of a social account is its public nature, the understanding each user has, from the moment of launch, that everything is for public consumption. But perhaps we are overstating the effect of this distinction: If in private, most of us allow ourselves to say or write certain truths we otherwise wouldn’t, then perhaps the reverse holds true. Perhaps we share things in public that we couldn’t offer in private. If we’ve accepted that we are different in private, is this not also true for how we reveal ourselves in public? And which version of ourselves is more real?
As young people, we are trying to find our voice: trying out who we are, again and again, until something feels more accurate than the previous thing. Yet we rarely admit—or even recognize—that this is what we’re doing. On social media, few people confess that they’ve poured immense time and energy into what they post. We don’t confess this because we assume we’re the only ones who fret over such trivial things. Because nobody could possibly be as self-conscious as we are. We believe what we see. And we can’t be what we can’t see. We are so credulous when we assume that everyone else must be the version of themselves they portray in public, even if we are hardly the people we present ourselves as.
We put time into our social media because we believe that it affords us the unique opportunity to fashion our own identity. We care about the images we post and the lines we write underneath those images, because it’s all part of reflecting who we are and constructing who we want to become. Would you put more time, or less, into a post if you knew it was your last? Would you want the image and words to be perfect, an ideal lasting representation of you, or would you quickly recognize the futility of the pursuit, that the whole thing was a mirage merely reflecting distorted images of the real world? And would you instead spend your time absorbing the world itself?
On the night of January 17, Maddy took a series of photos of Rittenhouse Square, in downtown Philadelphia, on her iPhone. She was standing on the dead grass behind the main walkways in the park, behind the benches on which people lounge during spring and summer, and huddle during winter. Lights are dangling from the sparse trees, the beauty of the holiday season still radiating at dusk. The first photo Maddy took is cloudy in the lens, exuding dreariness. Her second photo showed nearly the exact same scene. In that image, an older couple is walking through the frame: the woman is wearing a red coat, the man a green coat and hat. The couple is in motion, a soft blur coming off each of them. In the final photo Maddy took, the couple is gone.
It is this last photo that Maddy began editing. She made the colors pop; the benches go from dull brown to a fiery red; the lights morph from small pops to glowing, gorgeous lanterns. And the night behind the foreground went from looking just like any other to appearing as something spectacular—a city park placed underwater, submerged, radiating.
This was not a picture of the real world, but a picture of what Maddy wished the real world looked like. “I tell my kids all the time: You have to decide how you’re going to filter the world,” Lorraine says. “You have to check yourself daily—what am I making of everything I’m seeing? Does everything they’re seeing have to be as good as everything we expect of them? I think we tell our kids they have to be really, really good at all these things. I think it’s rampant, especially in these affluent suburbs. This generation, everybody is supposed to be good at everything. But God forbid if you’re not. I tell my kids: I went to college. Nobody took us on college tours. They were just like, ‘You want to go to college?’ And they would drop you off and that was it. Nobody checked in on everybody, all day every day. The difference is astounding. Everybody is hovering over these kids. Are you winning at every game? Are exams going well? What are you doing with your free time? The pendulum has swung so far to the other side. I think it’s backfiring.”
Three versions of Rittenhouse Square, as shot and edited by Maddy on January 17; the final picture appeared on her Instagram account. (Madison Holleran)
On Wednesday night, January 15, Maddy went to a party with Ingrid. She was wearing black tights, a sweater, her black Nike running sneakers, and a black jacket. As the two friends were leaving the party in the small hours of Thursday morning, Ingrid took a photo of her friend. Madison is standing on the sidewalk, her right hand on her hip. Her mouth is smiling, but the photo isn’t clear, and it’s impossible to see if her eyes are, too.
While at the party, Maddy had taken a few photos, most with Ingrid. She picked her favorite, one of just the two of them, a young man grinning in the background. Maddy filtered the image, popping the colors, then texted it to her friend Justine.
Maddy: Do u like this enough to Insta?
Everything is filtered, either on the way in or on the way out, or in both directions. This includes practically everything Maddy did: the interaction when sitting in front of the therapist, or in Emma’s kitchen with her best friend. But at least in those, Maddy could not hide so easily behind a second digital filter. She could not hide behind the breezy lightness of an added emoji: a monkey covering its eyes, or an “lol” or “hahahaha,” which she casually added to almost all her texts.
Is there a human, in-person equivalent of a monkey covering its eyes? If someone says to you, in person, that they hate where they are, or what they’re doing, or what their life has become, could they make those words softer with any kind of specific facial expression? Would it even matter if they tried? You would still be in front of them, reading their energy and emotion, and the smile on their lips would be false, incapable of dispelling their desperate energy.
We have translated expressions and emotions into emojis, and simply using an emoji seems to tell the recipient that all is okay. The inclusion of even one of those animated faces signals ease and lightness, regardless of what emotion the emoji represents, even if it represents crying. The acronym LOL rarely means laughing out loud—not literally laughing out loud, anyway. Very little of what we say in text is a literal representation of how we feel, what we’re doing, how we’re behaving. It’s an animated, easy-to-digest version: an exaggeration or a simplification, but not a reflection. And that would be fine if it weren’t the main way we now communicate with one another. We believe we’re communicating with the humans we love and adore, and we are. But we aren’t absorbing their humanity.
Emoji is the world’s first digital universal language, and it’s frighteningly superficial. Ironically, emojis are devoid of real emotion. Maddy was in constant contact with dozens of friends and family, a skimming of the surface covering miles and miles of ground but very little depth. And through all those messages to all those people, thousands and thousands of communications, almost nobody noticed anything significantly amiss.
Before returning to Penn in January, Maddy asked her parents if she could take with her a picture of herself as a kid, holding a tennis racquet. She asked for duct tape, which went unused. And eventually, at some point before she left her dorm room on January 17, she opened her MacBook and wiped her Internet history. She was preparing for what had been simmering on the back burner; she was moving it to the front.
Anticipation
Anticipation is one of the best parts of life. When I was twenty-two years old, I quit my job playing professional basketball in Ireland, but before I retreated home to the States, head down, embarrassed, I disappeared on a backpacking trip through Europe. I took a cheap flight from Dublin to Paris, then a train to Milan, then one to Rome, Rome being in my mind the climax of this spontaneous journey. I had studied Latin for three years. And after that, or perhaps because of that, I became fascinated with the Roman Empire, in particular the Colosseum. I kept a journal on this trip, and I remember pulling out that small black notebook while sitting in my seat on the train, watching the Italian countryside pass. I wrote, detailing on those pages how I assumed the Colosseum would make me feel. I had conjured images of it, an approximation, from all the movies and news stories and pictures in textbooks I had seen over the years. And I explained to myself, writing sentence after sentence, what it would feel like to stand inside a piece of history: I imagined the collective energy of the millions who had come before, who had passed through the same space. I imagined that this energy, like a ghost, would make my hair stand on end. I would hear the echoes of those ancient crowds, bloodthirsty, human, wanting. I imagined myself standing within this swirl of energy and emotion, as this was a place that had housed so much of both.
I never imagined feeling nothing. And yet, once the train pulled into Rome and I wended my way to the Colosseum, I remember standing inside, and there it was, an emotion impossible not to name: disappointment. The birds chirped. The sky was a lovely blue with the occasional milky cloud. Beads of sweat pinned my shirt to my back. I looked around at the crumbling structure, at the other people exploring the space. I closed my eyes. I willed something, anything, to wash over me. Nothing did. I was still just—me. The same me, with the same worries and concerns and hopes, the ones that somehow I had imagined would be made small by the force of history. My anxiety over quitting basketball in Ireland, and how puzzling my future now appeared to me, had dislodged me from the present. I felt very much like an astronaut slowly floating away from her spaceship, desperate for a force to push me back to safety. Somehow I had hoped that standing in the Colosseum would be like consulting a medium, allowing me to stand among the collective yearning of the masses. And this would make me feel less alone, would be the gust that pushed me back to safety. But I was unchanged. After a while I left the famous structure, and on my walk to the hostel where I was staying, I bought an apple from a corner store. It tasted the same as any other.
On the train back to Paris, I again pulled out my notebook and attempted to explain what I had felt, and what I had not felt, and why I had not felt it, and what that lack of feeling might mean. And I landed on one specific thing: perhaps some things really are better left to the imagination.
When I got home to the States, one of my friends asked about my backpacking trip. I explained the highlights and the adventure, and then I said, “But I went to the Colosseum and, I don’t know, it just didn’t do anything for me. I had built it up in my mind I guess, but I just stood there, disappointed.” My friend looked at me and frowned, and in that second I considered for the first time that maybe blame for the disappointment I had felt lay not with the Colosseum, but with me. My friend then said, “I’ve always wanted to go to Rome—don’t bum me out!”
From then on, when people asked about my trip and I showed them pictures—the tangible kind, from those yellow disposable cameras—if they asked how amazing the Colosseum was, I found myself lying, saying, “Amazing—so amazing.” I had somehow decided it was my social and moral obligation to have loved this trip, loved this adventure, and specifically loved the Colosseum, so as not to rob others of even a moment of that vicarious, transferrable excitement—of their own joy of anticipation. And also, expressing any kind of disappointment with a trip to Rome is unpopular, especially when articulated to anyone who hasn’t been lucky enough to go.
I tell this story to illustrate that all of us feel an obligation to optimism and happiness when we’re around others. If you break down my trip to the Colosseum, which occurred before the advent of social media and smartphones, you’ll notice that my behavior—before, during, and after—almost mimics the way I would act today. As I approached the structure, I built it up in my mind by writing it into life to pique my own interest. Today, I’d likely look through tagged pictures of the location on Instagram. After my visit, I quickly shifted to telling a superficial but upbeat story about the moment, not very different from what I might do now, which is tag myself on Instagram in a picture at the landmark with the hashtag “amazing.”
The main, glaring difference between now and then is that in 2005, I was at least somewhat present during the moment I was actually standing in the Colosseum. I took one or two pictures on my camera, but I wasn’t considering the social capital of an Instagram post from that geo-tagged location. I had enough space to consider myself in relation to the millions of ancient Romans who had climbed those steps (even if I failed in fully connecting to that history). Now, today, I fear I would only consider all the others who were Instagramming from there and elsewhere, and how the image I produced might compare. Eventually, the story of my 2005 trip to the Colosseum would become a kind of performance—but it wasn’t yet, not while I stood inside those ancient ruins, feeling not much of anything.
The best part of life is often the way we anticipate what is to come. For a trip, for the weekend, for a party, for so many moments that are happening after and apart from the ones we are currently living. Sometimes we also believe that another place will change us, or at least how we feel, and that it will be a change for the better. And even if we recognize, when we get to this time or place, that it has not changed us, that we are still just ourselves, we cannot help but fall for this trick the next time, and again and again afterward. We fall for it because it soothes us during all the moments we aren’t doing exactly the thing we wish we could be doing, and because it allows us the transcendent emotion of anticipation. Anticipation allows us to be in two different moments at once. But it is often a zero-sum game: we steal from one to fuel the other.
In the poem “Questions of Travel” by Elizabeth Bishop, she writes the following: “Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres? / What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life / in our bodies, we are determined to rush / to see the sun the other way around?” Anticipation fuels optimism, at least temporarily. We tell ourselves that the current moment will not last forever, that the next moment will deliver us somewhere better. Of course, if that promise is repeatedly broken, if those next moments are never better, a kind of melancholy can set in: both our present and future seem tarnished.
Isn’t social media fueled by anticipation? A world exists in our phone, which we can retreat to—an escape that might offer us something more pleasant, or at least a distraction from our momentary boredom at being a human who is alive in the world, and therefore dealing with all the things that come with that. Social media reflects our actual existence, but feels freer: not mired in tangible weight and sweat and fear and sadness. Social media is a picture of the Colosseum in glorious lighting, with an upbeat hashtag; it’s not the friend standing in front of you, dismayed at her inexplicable disappointment.
In the fall of 2015, I guest-taught a freshman class at Columbia University. Approximately twenty-five students had read “Split Image” as well as a collection of essays by Susan Sontag, On Photography. The idea was to introduce to the students the concept that photographs, though seemingly unbiased, are often manipulated as much as, if not more than, words. Sontag writes:
Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lane) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film—the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.
One key word exists in the above Sontag quote: conscience. During our conversation at Columbia, the students mined how they felt about social media, and they kept striking on a similar concept: obligation. So many of these college freshmen felt a moral obligation to project a certain kind of happiness. They could not, as one student put it, “in good conscience” disseminate sadness and unhappiness into the world. Because they chose to remain conscious, they participated in a performance meant to make the collective comfortable, but which came at personal cost—a cost often small, but occasionally great. The layers of ethical issues are numerous. Some of us could be sharing “just to do it,” but the fact of our sharing will evoke in others feelings and ideas about the way the world works. Our posts are part of an ecosystem: we are all engaged in creating a story that reacts to the stories around us. Then if you dig one layer deeper, we are dealing with another variable. Before we share, we engage in a conversation with ourselves about what kind of image of ourselves we are placing in the world and what the image must mean to us as it relates to the world. Social media is a form of offense and defense: we consume, we absorb, and we decide what to consume and absorb based on what we’ve consumed and absorbed.
Inside that small Columbia classroom, we started discussing this cycle at a granular level. We experience a moment emotionally. And during many such moments, we often consciously capture an image, the content of which is often the most appealing interpretation of the moment. Then we make an intellectual choice about if, and how, to share that image, a decision often but not always influenced by the moral obligation we feel to contribute positively to society. After we share the image, we monitor the feedback on the post, which will influence our understanding of what does and doesn’t resonate, and what we might share next time. Then the cycle starts again. We start viewing our world through the lens of what shares well—a hybrid reality in which people and locations and pops of color exist both in our tangible world and also as backgrounds for images that will share well. In other words, when you walk through Central Park, you are partially absorbing the sights and sounds of being alive, and you are also pasting items, in your mind’s eye, into a potential social post. Perhaps we are now all like walking versions of those collages we used to make—the ones that incorporated real photographs as well as idealized magazine cutouts and headlines.
The question bouncing around the minds of these students was more about effect than about process: Were they emotionally experiencing life differently because of this cycle? Was it eroding the quality of their experiences? When you are not concerned with sharing every moment with hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of others, does the moment belong to you in a more profound way? Sometimes when we talk of Hollywood stars, we hypothesize that all of the pictures they’ve had taken of themselves, those posed for and those stolen, have somehow zapped them of an unquantifiable essence, like a distant cousin of what happens to the photographs themselves, which fade over time. If you share a picture of yourself eating pie, instead of simply enjoying the pie in real time, is your absorption of the sensation diluted?
A few hours after the class at Columbia, I was walking along the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn, talking to my dad. The sun was bright in the sky, and I remember looking at the light reflecting off the usually dense, murky canal water, and I remember considering for the first time that this dingy body of water was actually appealing in its own, flawed way. (Ever since that day, I’ve looked at the Gowanus differently—seen it as a kind of artwork, a literal absorption of the city it runs through.)
As I was watching light bounce off the canal, I was telling my dad about the class, and about Maddy and what she must have been feeling and thinking. He had listened to me on this topic many times over the months, but on this day, after I stopped talking, he didn’t reply. I waited for one beat, then another. I flexed my foot on the bottom rung of the railing that kept me from tumbling into the water.
“You there?” I finally asked.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said, then paused again. “Just do me a favor, okay? Take care of yourself. Promise me that if you start feeling down, you’ll tell me.”
“Oh, Dad,” I said. “I’m okay; I promise.”
“But—do you see yourself in Madison? Is that it?”
“I mean, I guess in some ways, yes,” I said. “In some ways, I think I know exactly what she was going through, because I’ve been through the same thing. But then when it comes to how she seems to have interpreted these things, how they felt to her—well, that’s where I stop seeing myself in Maddy.”
The response I gave my dad that afternoon is almost entirely accurate. Of course, if I mine deeper, I can find a connecting thread that helps me fully understand, even if tuning in to the frequency of that connection feels fleeting and distant, nearly abstract.
Crushing, debilitating anxiety has descended on me only once. I have battled everyday anxiety on occasions too numerous to count, whether before speaking in public, before going on TV, before offering an opinion in meetings. Yet during each of these occasions I understood, even as the weight of the fear commandeered a good portion of my brain and body, that the panic was temporary, circumstantial. The anxiety had a shelf life; of this I was sure.
But on one specific winter morning—the catalyst was the implosion of a relationship the night before—I awoke before dawn and, as I came to consciousness, experienced a blend of frenzied thinking and an overwhelming physical malaise that catapulted me into a state of panic. I tried breathing deeply, but my mind continued churning: What’s the point of all this? Who am I now? What does my future hold? Am I alone in the world? Will I always be alone? Aren’t we all, essentially, alone? I actually started talking aloud to myself, telling myself to calm down, that it would pass. But this self-talk failed. My heart continued racing, even though I hadn’t gotten out of bed yet—had barely even moved. I reached for an empty journal I keep on my nightstand; I tried to write my way out of the moment, believing that perhaps I could exorcise the thoughts, silence them by dragging them from my head to the paper, where they would wither and die in the open air. After writing furiously for seven pages, my handwriting slanted and messy, the ink blotting, I closed the journal and waited. I shut my eyes. The panic was still there. Is this feeling real? I asked myself. And do I have any control over it? It seemed as if I should have more control, for who could control it, who could make it go away, if not me?
I tried allowing the panic to just wash over me. Perhaps, I told myself, resisting the emotions was a mistake. Just feel it all, I told myself, then you’ll be done with it. For an hour I lay on my back, blankly staring at the white ceiling. At one point I curled up into a ball, hoping that anxiety was like nausea, and that mimicking life in the womb would ease the symptoms. Eventually I remember screaming into my hands, actually saying aloud, “What the fuck!”
The sun came up, and the city outside my window started making its usual noises: the F train running along the tracks, engines starting, the distant blaring of horns along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I remember, prone in my bed, looking at these noises—or, rather, looking at the drawn off-white shade, behind which was the window, behind which was the world from which these noises were emanating. I usually love these sounds: they’re proof of ordered chaos, of life and hope and optimism. But that morning the noises struck me as random and pointless, and if I’d had the power, I would have silenced all of it. The dull yellow of the early morning sun had backlit the drawn shade, and the whole image, which I’d seen and appreciated a hundred mornings before, disgusted me. Not a minute later, as I lay on my side, my pillow tucked under my ear, a thought came screaming around the corner of my mind and ran me over before I could dodge it: Holy shit, I can’t live like this. “This” had been going on for only three hours, and it was scaring me; I was scaring me.
I called my mom. I started crying. She took the next train from Albany down to the city. She hugged me when I collected her at Penn Station. We walked to get coffee. I tried to explain what I was feeling, what had happened. Nothing, not even the comfort of my mom, could calm me. That night, hours later, we decided to go see a movie, and at some point in the darkness of the theater, I could feel the fear start to seep out of my body. I tried not to pay it much mind in case my attention might halt the flow, but by movie’s end I had returned to a state of equilibrium that I vowed never again to take for granted. And to this day, when I see the poster for the movie we went to see that night, a mix of emotions bubble up, but the dominant one is gratitude that this bout of panic lasted only twelve hours. (Over the next few weeks I had random bursts of anxiety, but never again did it seem to coil around my heart the way it did that first morning.)
I do not live with daily, steady anxiety and depression; therefore I cannot know what life feels like if you do. But I know this: Madison walked a path. And at first, the path she walked is familiar to me: the sun is high; the grass is matted; the underbrush is tame. I’ve walked that path, or something similar. Then, at some point, the conditions start to change; they become more ominous, denser, less traveled. Then, farther ahead, the path appears to shape-shift—it’s not subject to the same laws of physics, of life. I can peer ahead into the distance and see the outline of where Maddy walked, but I cannot report back from the inside. For most of us, understanding how much of this path we’ve traveled is impossible: it’s a road of unknown length.