This week, number 3 on my to-do list is “post poem on IG.”

This is a recurring task that I do and then cross off, and then rewrite to the list for the next week. 

I stare at the task on my board, and I hate it. 

I hate it in the way you despise a hangnail on your pinky toe.

Or maybe perhaps more like you dislike an in-law. The one you can’t remove from the group chat. The ones that you can’t remove from your life completely because they are family, but always wish you could avoid, but also, you know you have to spend time with. But do you have to spend time with them?

It’s a spiral of toxic abuse. You’re not supposed to complain about hating it.

As much as you do, hate it, because complaining is for complainers. And why don’t you just give it up instead?

Now, social media feels so ingrained in our lives I can’t tell if walking away is even an option, but is that addiction or an actual life-jacket to some skewed semblance of rebranded success that I’m clutching? 

Regardless, it’s bad for me—and probably bad for you, too—but I’m not a doctor or psychologist. I’m just a writer sharing my experiences and opinions.

Are you reading? Do you hear me?

It’s hard to tell.

Sometimes, I feel like the seven-year-old version of myself, the one who believed I could sing when I really can not sing at all. I mean, physically, I can sing, but you do not want to hear it.

It is not good. 

But I thought it was.

For a long time.

Before, somehow, I heard myself for real. Then when I heard it, I could never unhear it, and the spark that I felt in my belly, the one that said you’re really good at this, died. I had no tone.

And that’s what scares me most as a writer. Not the level of success – whether it exists or not, but rather one day, I’ll wake up and not so much cringe or flinch at my writing because I do that now, but more that I’ll realize the things I wrote,

never had any tone.

I couldn’t really sing.

Anyway, that’s why social media is bad for me.