Insatiable

words by Shruti Shah, art by Ashley Xiao

It’s 3 AM and you’re on Instagram the same way you always are. Your eyes are crossing because of how late it is and how tired you are and how much you wish you were asleep – but you’re not. 

You’re scrolling and you’re comparing the same way you always do. You try to think back to this morning, but all you can see is the fluorescent light. You don’t remember anything past the last scroll, the last second when you saw another flawless face flash across your own. You consume it. You eat it up like you’re starving, like you’ve never quite needed something like you need this. You crave it, actually — that rush you feel from seeing someone so close to perfect. It validates what you already know: that you’ll never get anywhere close. That you’re too different. That you’re too fractured. 

So you continue to scroll. Your eyes burn, but you’re used to it by now. This is, after all, a daily occurrence. You do this as often as you can because you love the way it feels when your brain turns to mush. The world melts away and you can pretend it doesn’t bother you how little you feel when your brain switches from a new dance to a makeup tutorial to the horrors occurring in another country to ones occurring in your own. You’re used to it. You consume it.

So when you tell your therapist you can’t feel, she tells you it's normal. She reminds you that you’re young and that everyone your age thinks they’re broken. It's a result of social media, she preaches. A side effect. A horrible by-product that you can never quite escape. She reminds you that it's your fault. If only you could set a screen time limit, you would be fixed. If only you could talk to your best friend about it without feeling like you need to throw up, you will be cured . If only you interacted more, maybe with the same people who made you like this in the first place. Maybe it would fix you: seeing them face to face, reminding yourself that they, too, are just as disgustingly human as you.

But for now, it's too hard. It hurts too much, so you ignore it. You wake up. You go through the motions. You smile and crack jokes and wince when they laugh at your expense. You excuse yourself to the restroom, and that's when you see her there, hands clutching the counter, crying. It's confusing to you at first because you can’t quite connect the dots between the person you saw smiling perfectly on Instagram and the one with tear streaks on her face. Your brain freezes for exactly three seconds before you ask her if she’s okay, if she needs anything, if you need to hurt someone for her. She laughs a little and says that she’s just having an off day. That she hurts. You know the feeling; you feel it too. But you had never stopped and wondered if the girl behind your screen did.

Tonight, you don’t scroll. You pull out your journal, long abandoned. You used to love journaling, especially at night when it was quiet enough for your thoughts to get loud. You’d tell the journal everything you wish you could say out loud. You’d tell it the things you never knew you wanted to say. You wish you had done this a while ago, but you remind yourself that wishing hasn’t gotten you very far. So instead you write. You pour yourself into your journal until there's a puddle of you between the pages. You melt into it. It consumes you. It eats your words like it’s hungry for them, like it’s been waiting quite some time for you to come back – and that's what you are. You’re back. The words pull you out from under yourself and suddenly there’s air, fresh and untainted and clean. You close your journal, lay back, and breathe it in.