becoming a meme ruined my life

on being an e-girl and what to do if it happens to you. hear my cries.

TW: SH mention

2022 will go down as my first full-year drinking legally, the last year i slept with a man, and the year i became immortalized on knowyourmeme.com

it was april– a sleepy morning. the windows were sweating. it was hot. my mom made me coffee. i was a 21 year old girl basking in regular levels of confidence when the unthinkable happened: thousands of men formed a union against me. the masses had come to the same, nightmarish conclusion: i was mid, and i had a url to prove it.

if you need a refresher, here is “mid” as defined by the urban dictionary… 

and here is a video i found on youtube explaining my lore. my favorite part is the genshin-impact gameplay. i edited the clip to make it a little more bearable ;)

i'm not exactly sure what crawled out of the fiery pits of hell to relegate me to mid-dom, but i can hypothesize that it might have something to do with men. i rose to internet-recognition through a series of grotesque “comedy” videos that made men very angry or specifically bricked. while the videos are nowhere near as funny now as they were (not) then, i give myself grace for hoping to make social commentary in the performance-art trenches. we all have our phases.

i didn’t realize my cleavage pulled views until the first time someone recognized me in public. i had been going through a break up, and my mormon aunty took me to the mall to cheer me up. as we were checking out, the cashier took an infinite look at each of my boobs:

“are you that one tiktok chick?”  

i was wearing a mask; there were no other identifiers. i was, indeed, that tiktok chick.

with celebrity treatment like this, i ~must~ have been in my burgeoning renaissance. yet, somewhere between content farming and making sweet love to my algorithm, i lost the plot. i mistook numbers for an audience that cared about my creative voice until there was nothing left but chest-staring cashiers, hasan piker fans, and weebs who made memes like this: 

i was, officially, a mid girl. 

it’s lonely being mid. only few can relate to becoming a meme, let alone a meme about being worse than ugly: average. the most empathy i am able to squeeze out of a public citizen (not meme-d) is, at most, a shared insecurity in our smile lines. i’m in a two-person club with bad luck bryan and, although i used to dream of my likeness becoming prolific, no one prepares you to become prolific for being medium-ugly.

whenever i meet someone, my meme-ification is sure to come up in conversation. i mean… wouldn’t you share your villain origin story, if you had one? the common reaction is pitying laughter, a look of horror, or something in between. i get a lot of questions about how it affected me. my therapist is still wondering the same thing, two years later, because i avoid talking about the issue in a serious manner unless i’m at peak depression.

for all the people saying:

you. are. wrong!

to prove that i am completely fine and well-adjusted after all of this, i will provide a list of things to expect should you also be meme-d for your mid-ness. the following is not a one-size-fits-all for those who’ve survived meme-ification, but it comes very close:

you will…

• receive countless requests to do sex work. at first it will make you feel like belle delphine. you will be tempted to sell your bathwater or armpit hair, but after a while you will become acutely exhausted by the 21st century normal: that is, strangers asking you to “show v*gina for $5 a month” as if the $5 erases the harassment. you will always be surprised that people DM this request. if you were a sex worker, wouldn’t you advertise your wares enough so that people don’t have to ask? it’s hard work, after all.

• learn that “gooners” aren’t just basement dwellers. they might be your friends– or worse, your partner. you will learn this because the person you’re dating will tell you they “used to whack-it to your instagram” before you were together. they will mean it as a compliment and you will laugh at first, but then you will find out that they also use your friends' instagrams. it will make your stomach mush. you will feel violated. you will realize you are dating someone who would be in your reddit forum. gooners are everywhere. be on high alert! 

• find out that deepfake nudes look *very* real. you are not the exception to rule 34. try not to peruse the reddit forum about you. the 8,000+ users will only make you sad.

• go to your first comedy show in new york. a random white man *will* interrupt the conversation you’re having with the person who invited you. he will make an obscene joke about you looking like Anne Frank. you do not find bigoted jokes funny, so you will not laugh. you will tell him his jokes are bad, and he will proceed to change the subject by calling you “approach-ably hot” and “not-blonde” and “hot enough but not margot robbie-hot.” he will tease your indigenous name. he will tease the way you say “Hawaiʻi” even though you say it like your ancestors: correctly. he will sit next to you the entire show and act like you are friends even though you are very-much-not. he will remind you of that guy who groped you at your first college halloween party. try to ignore him.

• think about porn. a lot. after reading thousands of comments about how people use your photos, this is inevitable. you will dream about porn. you will meditate about porn. you will cry about porn. you might even cut about porn. you will curse porn. you will consume *exclusively* hentai because all the women in real-person porn have your face.

• reconcile that some people like “mid” things. think about it! you know at least one psychotic freak who loves a lukewarm shower and bread without butter. they probably like drinking milk without cookies, as well, but they are nice enough. you do not have to be hot. bitches who blow on their soup spoon will love you. you’re just right.

i think what scarred me most about being meme-d has nothing to do with how i look and everything to do with my existential worry. it’s the mediocrity of it all. it’s the fact that, since i was 5 years old, i’ve been terrified of being forgotten– that i’ve hoped to be “more” than average for decades. what if my peak is simply being identifiable by my average-ness? how do i face the immortal sum of my internet-parts? 

both the effects of the internet and of being meme-d are insidious, immortal, evolving, and lack a specific takeaway. there is no full circle moment to having your humanity publicly stripped. there seems to be no no certainty in this life other than the cruelty of man…

anyway! my favorite part about the lore video i shared earlier is that it also happens to be a part of a fundraiser. so far, it’s raised $16,922.00. 

so, enough negativity. i guess my mediocrity is changing the world (or, at least, central florida).

maybe one day you, too, can reach the same heights as i have with a mirror selfie