How media affected my grieving

I don’t need to explain what a vital role social media plays in our society (your only access to this is literally social media so I’m pretty sure you’re aware.) I think though, it’s imperative to revisit how my grieving has shifted throughout the uprise of social media. When my father first passed away Facebook had only been around (or at least popular) for about a year. For me, Middle School consisted highly of “photoshoots,” inviting your friends (or classmates) over to take photos of each other to post. When my dad past away I was given his cameras, making myself believe I was just about to be the coolest person at the school. I marched into seventh grade with my giant Cannon Rebel XT feeling like a camera queen. I offered to take photos of everyone and anyone, despite not exactly knowing how to use it. Admits this, my dad’s Facebook page was picking up high speed. People were constantly posting memories, photos, and wishes and prayers to all of us. I didn’t check it much, though. I remember the day of his memorial I had a photoshoot with my best friend and posted the photos of us running around happy. It was a happy occasion, but something doesn’t seem right about it. I was being brought up in a society where who you were online was who you were in real life. If you emitted any type of negative emotion, people immediately granted you with a “weird” sticker. A huge reason why I masked how I was truly feeling for a while was because I feared that anything posted online would reflect negatively on me. Strange? Right? Even when I attended grief camp I brought a disposable camera to capture all the “happy” moments. Don’t get me wrong, I met some of my favorite people there, but a Facebook album titled “Camp Erin (:” with only intensions of getting an abundance of reposts on Tumblr isn’t healthy. The day after my dad passed away I posted a extremely simple status ( pictured below.)

WHICH for clarification my dad's middle name as ALAN and he was born in 1962. SO. While going through my Facebook archive I noticed a few of these confused and sad status' which looking back, I think I genuinely just needed someone to look at me and tell me what I was feeling was ok. After these status' everything else was seemingly happy- as it should be for a middle schooler (or, I guess, as happy as a middle schooler can be.) The strange part was that is not how I remember feeling. I remember writing status’ about hating my life and wanting to die ( which would be deleted before they were posted and replaced with a "like my status" kind of post.) I remember having a tumblr that was about self harm, but I only posted about the one with my "photography". I remember sitting in my bathroom screaming and crying and cutting off almost all communication in person with everyone, but on Facebook I would tag every person I knew and then write how much I loved them. We already know it’s hard for a 12 year old to process feelings and grief, but the status’ and my online persona was a complete lie. Going through high school social media just blossomed even more. Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. I had a different intent on each with a specific “brand” for myself. NOW-before I continue this is not something I have stopped doing- I still care a lot about what people think of me online and it would be stupid to say that isn’t true, but I’ve realized how my grieving was manipulated through it. Because I was so fearful of how the internet would perceive me, and how that would spill over into reality, I hid it. I dug it really deep and kept it in a box. Recently, I gave a presentation on grief and talked about this a lot. We discussed if and how you can capture grief in photos- and I urge you to think about this yourself. If you google grief online a lot of photos of people crying comes up- this is not grief, this is sadness. Sadness falls into grieving, yes, but it is not the only part. We also brought up how there’s a stigma that a lot of people post photos not as memories, but as ways for likes and attention. It brought up an interesting discussion, but also made me reflect on how grief is in our society. Because it isn’t categorized as a “normal” conversation, it holds a lot more heavier opinions. I am guilty of seeing photos of people with lost ones and judging thinking awful and unfair things like “well I bet they weren’t even that close” or “they’re just doing this for attention.” That is flat out disgusting and fucked up! Media was what made me apprehensive about posting about my dad in the first place, and no one is posting for attention. The argument of “keeping it to yourself if you really want to memorialize them” makes no sense. It’s hard to have this argument, and there’s a lot of sides to it. I don’t have the answers to what is right or wrong, or what you should or shouldn’t do. I just know for myself, it was a really extreme case of covering up the the truth.