An ode to being chronically online

and other depths of the ocean

I get it. I live online too. I have for the better part of my life. I don’t want to bore you but I started on AIM. Or maybe before that it was those Yahoo chat groups when you played a game, do you remember those? I assumed everyone in them was super old and I was a mere 11-year-old on there wondering what half of the stuff they were saying meant. Then came Xanga. I always wrote on my “socials”. Funny to call them that now. Did we ever think Xanga would be referred to as social media? I tried my hand at poetry and random musings of my week back then too. I remember creating multiple Xanga’s and sometimes creating joint ones with my best friend. I was always inspired by other Xangas that were filled with beautiful photos and quotes and we decided to make up as many poems on Post-it notes as we could, to post them. We sat in my best friend’s bedroom at the time, which was filled with everything she had ever received and bought in her life. There were CDs everywhere, letters and dance gear, and clothes laying haphazardly on the dresser. It was a pink explosion of creativity. And I loved being in there with her brown Labrador at our feet. I guess I found it more freeing than my bedroom at home where we were taught to clean out our rooms every couple of months, “spring cleaning” and whatnot. So we lay on her bed and got to work doodling on Post-it notes, deciding which ones were the best ones to share.

Then Tumblr came and there was the feature to ask questions and I think that’s when I first started noticing that people were becoming popular or even famous online. I was still very young but I remember staying up as late as I could to see these “famous Tumblr” accounts answer all these questions. I want to answer questions! I used to think. But really now that I reflect on it, I think maybe I just wanted people around me to care enough to ask me questions. I’m unoriginal in that, I am from the suburbs and I wanted the life I saw on TV, was that too much to ask? I wanted friendship and glamour and the city and to fall in love over and over again. I wanted to feel a love so great it broke my heart. The kids were sort of awful where I grew up like in most places, and maybe I wanted to run away from that a bit, and the only readily accessible place I could escape to was online. A world where I wouldn’t get made fun of for expressing myself and one where I could safely do it from behind the screen. So that was Tumblr. Then there was Myspace, where you could follow musicians and feel connected to them in a real way. It was when the world started opening up a bit more because you could see people from other cities, even other states. Maybe this was where the dopamine effect started happening in the social media world. Those big bold “New Friend requests!” and “New Messages!” It was the exclamation point that always sent me over the edge of excitement. I remember getting my first and only online boyfriend on Myspace and talking all through the night on AIM. It all still seemed like the wild wild west out there and mostly our parents were nowhere to be seen. I’m not sure they knew what half of these things were. I remember my friend’s mom would ban us from using the computer at night to log onto these websites but naturally, we did anyway. Firing up the old computer— the fan was so loud we had to make popcorn in the microwave to cover up the sound of the clanking machine. Then there was Facebook which happened in High school for me. My friends and I would take photos with our Canon PowerShots and upload 90 photos into an album. What a strange phenomenon. This was before curation. I had little boundaries then with social media and I was also largely unaware of how visible I was. Yet, at that time I was trying to be as visible as possible to get the boy’s attention.

I’m beginning to lose the thread of the timeline of all the socials. They are starting to bleed together in my brain and that’s probably because more socials started to emerge around the same time. So there was Instagram and then Twitter. I downloaded Instagram pretty soon after it became available. A new app for photos? That sounded like a dream! I loved taking photos, who didn’t? By this point, I had a new friend group. My friend groups seemed to shift with the waves of new social media apps. Instagram felt more isolated and curated. Even in its inception, it didn’t feel like like a way to connect locally online, that’s what Facebook was for. It felt like a way to hide out alone or with your friends and share the world through the lens of your eye. I was always looking for communities outside of my area. I wanted to see the world at large! Even if that meant from a computer screen or a phone screen. Then there was Twitter, and it’s only fitting that that’s where me and Hayden technically met first. Social media was where I explored photography and writing. It was where I learned and developed my crafts. It was my school and my college and my home. It was my workshop. I have grown up in step with social media.

But what has being chronically online done to me? A part of me thinks I would be better adjusted if I wasn’t SO online. I have found myself at the mercy of merit, acceptance, and praise from the online world. And conversely, I have learned I can be accepted somewhere, be praised for my art somewhere, and gain merit somewhere. I have become torn between the pros and cons of online life since being an adult. It started to get confusing when I could no longer tell someone’s true intention or motivation for being online. But why should that matter? Maybe growing up with social media I have learned to abandon my boundaries when I am feeling empty. I seem to wear my heart on my sleeve online and pour into as many people as I can in hopes that they pour into me too. But lately, I have found myself asking, Do they actually care about me? Or am I a part of their social ladder-climbing? But perhaps this is where being chronically online has hindered me. I forget often that social media is a tool and not an identity. But I’ve been using this tool for so long that I have forgotten that it isn’t part of my identity. Being online does not mean everyone doesn’t exist or exists only at your whim/disposal. It means there are hundreds of humans out there using the same tool as you, probably in hopes of the same thing.

I googled myself before writing this which I don’t normally do but I was curious what would come up. Who is Briana Soler online? I saw my WordPress was high on the list so I logged on. Going back to that space, where I mostly wrote in Boston made me wince. I was so obviously always writing from a place of hurt, defense. Maybe I still am now. I flinch at how susceptible I was to naysayers and negative people. But I remind myself to be gentle. I read as much as I can stomach. I was writing for me, there was no audience, and I wrote with such vigor. It was a good reminder that I will always write no matter if my audience is only Hayden. Then I went back to Google and found an old article The Boston Globe wrote about me in 2013. They had an “Instagram Style Star” column I guess, where they would feature a new person each week. I still to this day have no idea why they selected me to do this interview. I scan the interview with one eye open, holding my phone at arm’s length away, rereading that I liked my cowboy boots and photography.

As I sit here and archive all my old WordPress posts I think what a silly thing to be so online. What a strange occurrence. There are so many images of my face and my words floating in the ether. I have forgotten them all almost. I am trying to archive as much as I can and yet I am also always constantly looking for myself online. Both literally and figuratively. Sometimes memories of things are so dim that I wish I could find some trace of them online. That one dance video from competition has to be out there somewhere right? I search and scrub and pretend I’m a detective, but there’s no use. And then I think it’s probably better that way because I’m probably misremembering it all anyway. 

And truthfully when I look at my past lives online I get a pang in my chest, a sharp cold gust of air shoots in my heart and I almost can’t breathe and I am reminded of what heartbreak feels like again. That’s the thing about burning bridges, I never learned how to be friends with all my past selves. I have always left them cold in the dark, hidden them, or set them on fire keeping them as far away from my mind as possible. And maybe that’s what my subconscious is trying to tell me with these deep waters. Maybe I have left myself online breadcrumbs all along. I’ve been writing about my life with pictures for so long now, the majority of my life I realize. And for some reason, I continue to be surprised that I am the same person I’ve always been, despite the flowing changes the core of the self remains.

I guess I am wondering when it all got so contrived. I mean, I know but also, I don’t. Influencers came on the scene and they created a new way of advertising and marketing and thinking about products or even lifestyles. Lifestyles were always sold to us, in fact, everything on Instagram and socials already existed in real life but these platforms exacerbated them. All of a sudden there was an influx of things you didn’t have, places you weren’t, or images of what you didn’t look like but should. And social media works a little like FOMO (fear of missing out). Everyone is excited about something and you think you are missing out by not being involved in it. I am trying to wrap my brain around when everyone’s objective was to be famous online. Or at least the ones who are actively on the platform creating things. It’s so hard to trace everything back and try to pinpoint it on one thing. 

I am aware that I might be too zoomed in. That none of this might matter and that I am dissecting something that doesn’t need to be dissected. But by understanding social media I feel like I can better understand myself. Social media often acts like a mirror and shows me the things that my subconscious is grumbling about. The World Wide Web reminds me of our subconscious which reminds me of the ocean. They all contain multitudes of depths, and you can lose yourself in all of them. I have been reading Inner Work by Robert Johnson which talks about unlocking our subconscious—that deep well inside all of us that makes most of our decisions. The things that trigger me on social media are deeper things that my subconscious is trying to talk to me about. The more I ignore it the deeper I get into online culture. At the same time, the more I analyze myself the more I run into myself. Meaning, the cycle continues and no matter how much digging I do I am right back where I have always been. The more I think I evolve the more I realize I am on a wheel that keeps spinning—meeting itself every day.

And sometimes this need to go to the depths of an answer is like the people who got in the submarine to see the Titanic. Why did they go? Why did they risk their lives? And maybe their own questions about the Titanic got the better of them too. Maybe they thought answers or wonders were at the bottom of the ocean. “Don’t go to the bottom of the ocean unless it’s worth it.” Hayden reminds me. This makes me think of this dream work and active imagination work that Carl Jung coined. The book makes warnings that you should attempt these practices in a safe space and know how to pull yourself out if you get too deep. I am scared to go to the bottom of the ocean of my subconscious, scared of what will come out, who will show up, and if I will be able to pull myself back up. But, I am curious what mystical creatures lie in wait for me. I am curious what archetypes are waiting to be heard in me.

I got swept up in it all too—on Instagram, on Bookstagram. I joined because I wanted to talk about books and create my art feely, outside of my local sphere. I joined because I wanted to find like-minded people. But I got carried away in the current of growing. I started posting for trends and “creating content” for Instagram. Instead of creating and then sharing with people. I started to forget that I have always simply created and then shared online. I started to forget that I get energized by seeing others create online and share. My numbers plateaued and started to drop and so did my self-esteem. I kept getting reminded on my “Creator” profile that my posts weren’t reaching, 10% lower than last week, thousands lower than the week before that, and it started to create a sense of panic and urgency. So I took a break, and I switched my profile back to a personal account so I am not reminded of stats and analytics of my work. I am not a product, I am an artist, but more than that I am a human, having a human experience.

All of this social media talk inside me got stirred up when Threads got released. I had not even heard that Zuckerberg was making it. I saw someone share something from it and I was intrigued so I downloaded the app. There, I found I was at the release party and everyone was excited to be a part of something new again, something where community felt possible again. Inevitably it will turn into what all social media platforms turned into, a way to make money, but for now, it’s this idyllic place where you can be seen and heard again because the algorithm isn’t only products and sponsored posts.

So what has being chronically online done to me? Is it bad? Do we even know the full long-term effects it will play on our society? Is there good and bad in it? Do all things start off innocently and pure? Is Threads the answer to a reset? No, not really. But it’s a nice reminder of community before performance. I don’t know the answers or the motives of why everyone is online. Likely it’s more or less the same reasons. I don’t know if we will ever be able to go back to a time before social media, nor do I know if that is even a good idea. It has given a voice to those who did not have one before, it has brought to light much that would have stayed hidden if not. And I sort of like that I have documented my life online through various socials. Even if I can’t find all the pieces I’ve left scattered about, they are there somewhere, marking my existence in this space, in this time. I don’t know what it means to be chronically online but as Hayden said, make sure you really want it before you go to the bottom of the ocean.