Trauma is the cheat code to internet fame. Post a tear-stained video that details the worst moment of your life and watch as the views click up.
Harrowing confessions of grief and shame run rampant online. I’ve watched strangers explain the details of their family estrangement, abuse and addiction. Yoga teachers who claim trauma is stored in the hips show stretches that they say will release it. Many repeat the idea that trauma can only be healed with total candour.
If the posters ever regret sharing these videos, that’s too bad. The internet is forever. Once content goes viral it is hard to erase completely, as previous generations of over-sharers now know.
The idea of telling complete strangers your most intimate problems online traces back to the bloggers of the early 2000s, who used personal stories to offer uncomfortable new perspectives. US mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, aka Dooce.com, was one of the best-known examples. Her vulnerability in sharing stories about the difficulties of motherhood was so radically different from the prettified version that she grew a passionate fan base. At its peak in 2009, her blog had 8.5mn monthly readers.
From such blogs came personal essays in online magazines like xoJane. The more shocking a story, the better the clicks. Writers traded trauma for bylines. For the magazines, running first-person essays about ectopic pregnancies and eating disorders was far cheaper than commissioning news reporting. Over time, however, it became a saturated and undervalued market. By 2017, the writer Jia Tolentino declared that personal essays were dead.
In fact, they didn’t die. They just shifted medium to social media. Raw, straight to the camera videos continue the tradition. Popular culture has taken note. Trauma has seeped into books, TV shows and films. It has become common to trace a main character’s back-story to one terrible event and its lasting impact. Hit shows like Ted Lasso and Fleabag use the so-called trauma plot to drive storylines and explain behaviour. Celebrities are invited to share painful stories in podcasts that often sound more like therapy sessions than interviews.
Much of this hinges on the theory that a person’s unhappiest memories are the key to understanding who they are. That can be intoxicating for the storyteller. Mass sympathy can make them feel heard and understood. That seems to be the driving force behind many such videos. Posters are mostly not financially compensated for laying their secrets bare. But surely goodwill from strangers is not enough of a reward for divulging secrets that will live online forever?
Worries about lasting digital footprints took off with the rise of social media. Teenagers were told they risked future university admission or jobs if they posted risky photos or messages. Companies declared they would check posts made by interview candidates. In 2017, Harvard rescinded offers made to nearly a dozen students who had posted offensive memes in a private Facebook group. A year later, Walt Disney fired director James Gunn over old tweets that joked about paedophilia and rape — though he was later reinstated.
Trauma dumping is unlikely to cause enough offence to warrant such a reaction. But it could be embarrassing. Being reminded of past versions of yourself by an unflattering photo on Facebook is awkward enough. A video in which you offer up stories of emotional damage seems painful.
The people who once wrote excoriating personal essays have gone on to describe the brutal impact of reading unkind comments from readers — and from falling out with people in real life. Mandy Stadtmiller, a former editor at xoJane, says that even those who believe they are braced for negative feedback “are never prepared for an anonymous-commenter backlash”. Blogger Armstrong was a lightning rod for criticism. She died last year by suicide. Her partner told the New York Times that he blamed online hatred for her depression years earlier.
Action is futile. You can delete old tweets and try to whittle down your digital shadow. Online reputation managers offer to do this too, for a fee. Some websites become defunct, erasing old posts. But there is no guaranteed way to take something back.
But there is another possibility. A general shift in attitude towards mental health seems to be changing the topics we consider appropriate to talk about in public. In the future, it may seem strange that anyone felt embarrassed for posting their traumatic stories online. If everyone shares their most painful secrets, the abundance will neutralise the shame.
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