Read Receipts & Teenage Angst
I don’t know what I did wrong. When I saw her profile on Tinder it was an easy swipe to the right. My confidence soared when the words, “It’s a Match”, popped up on screen. Even better than getting a match was the fact that this woman responded to my opener! She was easy to talk to and after the first 48 hours of classic dating app conversation she gave me her Snapchat. I found good lighting, got my angles right, and sent the first snap; my face and a cheeky opener. I was not foolish enough to think I had found my future wife, simply excited at the prospect of something new. The day went by and no response came. I held onto hope as I went to sleep. That hope evaporated when I awoke to the message being opened with no response. To this day I have the privilege of seeing her frequent snapstories as my dead attempt at conversation drifts deeper into my history. Ouch. This wasn’t the first time that Snapchat had brought me down, and not just because of failed romantic connections. I still use the app almost every day. However, in my teenage years Snapchat cracked my confidence time and again. I was forced to grow out of my immature communication habits and turn to other mediums for real conversations.
In my formative years I was too immature to realize the limitations of Snapchat. In high school, the more people you snapped the more popular you were. If the people you snapped were mainly members of the opposite sex you seemed even cooler. Call it what you will: vanity, a need to feel significant, an undeveloped understanding of society. Nonetheless, I was sucked into petty social beliefs and used Snapchat as my main mode of communication. This led to one terrible habit that would send me on a rollercoaster of emotions during this period of my life. That is, I would talk to people just for the sake of receiving a response. Even if they were just selfies or if I did not necessarily care about the person I was talking to, sending and receiving replies from others made me feel good about myself. The easy thing about Snapchat is how perfectly normal it is to send and receive messages with no words at all. In fact, most of the time that’s what my Snapchat streaks (an icon showing how many days in a row you’ve snapped someone) were based on. I couldn’t count how many times I received a Snapchat with no words other than, “streaks”. I knew this message was going to every person the sender had a streak with, but I didn’t care. I had a year and eight month long relationship in high school that ended on relatively bad terms. My then ex-girlfriend and I kept our streak for over a week by sending black screens to each other. What were we communicating? It certainly wasn’t, “I want you back.” If I had to hypothesize, we didn’t want the 500 next to our names to disappear. We didn’t care if the human being underneath it did.
Although the subject matter being communicated between my peers and I was shallow, it showed me that I was worth the time it takes to send that reply at a point in my life where I was yearning to be liked and accepted by my peers. For a time, I was empowered. I was confident. I was building what I believed to be relationships with my classmates and I had proof every time my phone buzzed with a notification. Then those buzzes turned from Snapchat messages to email promotions and disappointment.
Why were people not responding? I asked myself that question over and over. Was I not attractive enough? Did I not have a good enough personality? These questions caused levels of doubt and anxiety that I had never experienced before. Looking back, the answer was simple. I was a terrible communicator. The lack of engagement born out of selfies and one sentence messages created fragile relationships that could break at any moment. Think about it. If someone I was snapchatting stopped responding what would they lose? Not enough. That translated into how I felt about myself; I was not enough. A cycle began where my messages became even shorter and more tentative because I felt that if I said the wrong thing I wouldn’t receive a reply. Sometimes I would be the one who didn’t respond because I had some overwhelming feeling that the person didn’t want to talk to me, even when there were no signs that this was true. Eventually, I realized how toxic my relationship with the app was turning out to be. It was later than it should have been, but I decided to grow up and make changes in my life.
These days, I still use Snapchat. I have a handful of streaks that are a consequence of conversation, not the other way around. A lot of bridges had to be burned, or in this case a lot of streaks had to be ended. But as I said before, these relationships were held together by threads anyway. The main concept I had to change in my head was the whole basis of Snapchat. Who cares who you snap? Nobody. Your best friends list is not an indication of you as a person. The App Store description of Snapchat is, “the most fun way to share the moment!” In itself that statement is debatable. That being said, it points out what Snapchat is for; fun and sharing moments. If at any point you find that Snapchat causes you more anxiety than fun, reflect on what you are using the app for versus what its purpose is. Snapchat taught me valuable lessons about self-worth and communication, but it sent me on a long road to arrive at those conclusions. At the end of the day Snapchat has its uses, but serving as a platform for more than exceedingly casual conversation is not one of them.
