Dear Stranger On the Internet I Stalked Too Much

Most people never meet or live with the people they stalk on the internet,

but I had spent late-night parties with you, knowing you up close as the person you really were.

And I still fell for it.

I would look at your Instagram reels and stories believing your life was better than mine, while I had seen you that night being a total douche to a guy talking about his dreams.

I was always fascinated by the way you would put stories of your shopping, dancing without inhibitions at a fancy bar in an on-trend dress, loaded with comments and likes all over. Meanwhile, I was sitting there on my bed with a mediocre job, ignoring the best of my friends, to stalk you and think hard about why your life was better than mine.

When they created the internet, I think they created something that could play extremely well with our self-worth.

So, when you put up those foreign vacation pictures, I don’t know you got too drunk and told a stranger that your parents don’t love you enough. Or when you bombarded your feed with stories of that lavish wedding you had, you did not mention how generational wealth played an important part in that.

On the internet, you can be anything; you can edit the worst out of everything and the cycle continues.

For every post or story uploaded, someone out there asks why not me while putting aside the fact that our real-life stories are never our own, but are born out of factors beyond our control. The privileges we hold, the families we come from, the community we belong to and so many other things have played a part in our ability to put up a video at a rooftop bar that looked over the Eiffel Tower.

At one point I was addicted to your account like cigarettes.

And whoever has ever used tobacco knows how addictive it can be, how hard to let go, you say you would quit, but you don’t know what else to do when something even small goes wrong.

But I could not do it anymore, I could not give a stranger on the internet so much power over my life. The only life I had with limited time.

So, I quit.

I trained my mind to ask why whenever I wanted to stalk you. It’s like a breakup, of reimaging your life without something that has been the most important part of you. I kept asking myself what is it about you that made me so envious, was it your confidence, your beauty, your lack of inhibitions? It could not be your whole life.

Mostly when we are too deep into stalking we have only two options, to admire what they have with the deep knowledge that we can never have it, it just isn’t our thing, or to use it as a roadmap of what we want that they have and how we can have it.

It took me years of social media breaks and rewiring my brain to understand I could spend hours looking at the life of others on the internet out of envy or as an escape from my own pathetic life, or use that time to live my imperfectly perfect life.

I now, only look at accounts that make me feel good about where I am in my life. That makes me feel challenged but not jealous.

People I assume won’t be a douche to a guy talking about his dreams at a party.