𝐒𝐚𝐝 𝐓𝐢𝐤 𝐓𝐨𝐤 𝐏𝐨𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐥𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐑𝐮𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡

Aelflaed LoCicero

Mr. Carpentieri, Eng 160

Thesis 02

18 September 2023

Sad Tik Tok Poetry Slideshows are Ruining my Mental Health

 

Imagine, for a second, that you are me. It is a Saturday night, and you’re feeling incredibly depressed. I’m talking cold cup of ramen at 1:00 am alone depressed (my roommates weren’t even in the room, they were out having social lives); so decide to open TikTok, and immediately you are greeted with a slideshow with hard hitting quotes such as, “maybe I’m just hard to love and easy to leave,” and “can we have one more meaningless conversation,” (lucent) and suddenly, you’re questioning why you exist and why you still have the app installed on your phone. You start thinking, “If I hear ‘Need to’ by pinegrove one more time I’m actually going to start shaking and crying and throwing up,” as you debate sobbing.Yet, after this unsettling yet surprisingly common experience, I took a second to think about it. Why do these slideshows always hit me so hard? Why do I get irrecoverably and overwhelmingly sad each and every time? 

I think a lot about these TikToks, and the overwhelming simplicity of them. For example, the quote, “If I am killed for simply living, let death be kinder than man.” (Davis) runs around in my head fairly often, even when I’m not actively in a sad state. Another example is when “I, e” wrote , “And I’m sorry for scaring you, but I didn’t know being seen would cost me my life,” in their poem “Ten legs, eight broken,” and shattered me into pieces for a good few weeks. The thing about these short excerpts from poems or quotes is that in spite of their brevity, their effects are long lasting. I think it is in part because of this simplicity that they hit so hard. I think, eternally, people have longed to be understood- and to understand the world around them. People want others to know what they’re going through; and to understand it. People also want to understand themselves, so they can better identify why they have to struggle. Why they have to feel this way. 

So, when a TikTok is able to summarize these complex feelings in short, simple sentences, they tend to stick with the audience even past the initial reading. It makes the audience feel less alone, and these short snippets of melancholy are easy enough to remember that it makes their presence in the mind fresh for a lot longer. I am sad, but these short poems and the small audiences they reach make me feel less alone in being sad. 

(I should probably uninstall tik tok.)

 

Works Cited

 

Aletha Davis [writerandweeper] “Little drawing and poem by me :)) #poemsoftiktok #originalpoem #mouse #deer #moth #poetry #fyp #animals #sadpoetry #foryou” TikTok, 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8j71hSj/. 

I, e [@user68519586]“Ten legs, Eight broken” TikTok, 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/@user68519586/video/7243290765286198571. 

Lucent [hijzn]“Thinking back on all the things we did together was there anything to it? All that I gained was your responses, yet you had the chance to use me because of my transparency, in which you took it. I don’t miss you anymore. #need2 #pinegrove #foryou #lovebombing.” TikTok, 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8j71hSj/.