Crown shyness, a naturally occurring phenomenon first observed in 1920, results in crack-like gaps in a tree canopy. A clear streak of blue sky snakes along the channel between leaves. Studies find that as trees suffered physical damage from abrasions and collisions due to wind, crown shyness was induced. If the crowns are artificially prevented from colliding in the winds, they gradually fill the canopy gaps, but it’s rare for this occurrence to happen.
One theory to crown shyness is that trees are attempting to protect one another’s branches from getting cracked and broken in the wind. Below the canopies, a forest’s root system spreads one tree’s nutrients to other trees through a fungal network. In both layers of the atmosphere, trees have the ability to either help or destroy their neighbors, and suddenly humans seem to have this same capability.
At night, my eyes burned from staring at the blue light of my phone, scrolling through feeds of classmates out on dates, soliciting Sonic and McDonald’s after football games, dining at fancy restaurants in Fort Worth. My seven-month-old Instagram didn’t have a photo of someone other than myself or an inanimate object until February 17, 2013. Activated in May 2009, my Facebook’s first status was, embarrassingly, “must convince myself to move on... but i can’t.” A month later without anyone liking my posts, my crush commented on a status about a musician I liked to impress and feel connected with him. In the early years of college, hardly anyone viewed my Snapstory of mundane, trivial days, even though my long-distance friend threatened she would stop texting me if I didn’t get Snapchat because the memes I was sending took up too much of her phone storage.
The more the blue light dried out my corneas, the less I slept. My brain was famished of melatonin, a hormone that tells your body to close your eyes and recharge. It made me think even harder about the lack of communication between others, envying their seemingly pristine social lives, how desperately I wanted to join another’s story. In person, I tried to appear friendly and warm, but online I complained no one was really listening to me. If they could get to know me, they’d see I was actually cool and fun to be around. I was loyal and trustworthy and valuable. The problem was that I couldn’t project the right personality in the right place.
Eighth Grade has earned seven awards since its release in 2018, and all the New Yorker and The Atlantic reviews have spoiled how easy it is to flinch while watching Kayla experience her last week of classes before graduating to high school. Kayla struggles with social anxiety but ironically produces vlogs giving life advice to a nonexistent audience. At the end of each video, she pleads for the viewer to hit the subscribe button and/or leave a comment. Somehow she parallels her “real self” online rather than in person, where she is agonizingly shy and restrained to be genuine toward others.
In an unstereotypical perspective, Kayla is not bullied by her classmates; instead, she’s overlooked, invisible, left behind. Those more socially adept she tries to interact with are either flippant or unwillingly polite, and are never inquisitive to get to know her. In brief clips, she has successful conversations with a popular girl’s male cousin and the high school senior she shadows for a day. It seems she blossoms after their interactions—when the senior asks Kayla to hang out at the mall, Kayla drops the phone on her bedroom floor and squeals. She believes if people just tried to be friends with her, they would realize that she was actually worth their time. However, the way she presents herself to society is introversion beyond reversing, a counterfeit exhibition of who she really is. Yet she’s so appallingly relatable, a fictionalized yet nonfictionalized representation of my past self.
The film is terribly painful to watch.
Set in present day, the themes of loneliness and social media voyeurism also applied to my teenage years in the late 2000s and early 2010s, where I stayed attached to my phone, all the apps, all the vicarious social scenes I wished I had been invited to. Trying to keep up with social standards, I had my first co-ed birthday party at age thirteen. I stressed for days over what to wear in front of my crush and settled on a green UNT t-shirt and shorts. Anything to cover my fat. The popular girls were skinny and developing breasts and wore bikinis and stole everyone’s attention anyway.
In the middle of Eighth Grade, Kayla attends a pool party to the insistence of a classmate’s mom, and as she walks in the backyard, she scans the space and covers herself, clad in a green swimsuit that highlights slight back bulges, and she believes everyone is watching her, when they’re simply concerned about their own worlds. Her acne is magnified along the drops of water clinging to her skin. As she grips the pool’s edge, she finally grasps that no one has noticed her, and I felt the same way staring at my crush as he dove in, hoping for him to swim up to me.
We must’ve shared the same brain in different timelines.
There were 4.1 billion Internet users in the world in December 2018. Over 4 million blog posts are published every day. Over 500 million tweets are sent every day. Over 5 billion Google searches are made every day. 51.8 percent of all internet traffic comes from bots. There will be an estimated 2.77 billion social media users in 2019.
I have accounts on the following mobile apps: Facebook (851 friends), Twitter (50 followers), Instagram (460 fluctuating followers), Tumblr (287 followers), Snapchat (57 friends), Pinterest (455 followers). During grade school, I had approximately four (rotating) best friends; during college, six (rotating) best friends. Out of 176 contacts in my phone, I talk to ten people on a daily basis. Of those ten, I only trust two. Of those two, I truly trust one.
Being social became part of our biology. A typical person is born into groups of 50 to 150 people, which they usually stay with for the rest of their life—acquaintances, family, former and present lovers, online pen pals, spammers, medical professionals, fast food and retail employers, gas station cashiers, musicians, the homeless guy on the other side of town, the faces that pop up in their dreams from seeing them at the Portland train station nineteen years ago, friends who were presumed to last forever but have left before they could properly say goodbye.
“Social pain” is an evolutionary adaptation to rejection: a sort of early warning system to make sure you stop behavior that would isolate you. When loneliness creeps in, you either call someone to go out, or you remain in bed and grump over the fact that no one wants to be with you. When you realize you’ve been excluded from someone else’s story, you start to retract your presence so deeply that you’re the only one left in your narrative. This slow process can end in a mental state that prevents connections, even if you yearn for them. It’s why agoraphobics feel bitter toward the outside world: no one wants to come inside and see the mess they’ve made.
AOL Messenger ran from May 1997 to December 15, 2018. Teenagers left cryptic offline messages for those who followed them; waited for their crush to pop online. Somehow Messenger felt more communally safe than MySpace—one time my somewhat friend allowed me to hack her account and pose as her getting information from her friend that I liked, and when asked if he liked me back, he said I was ugly, and so I knew he couldn’t be convinced, being ugly was death back then, I logged off right quick—less competitive than feeling snubbed by not being included in someone’s Top 8 Friends. Liberty to be whoever you wanted to be. No need to decorate a webpage with gothic cartoons or sparkly graphics, curate a playlist that blared as soon as one opened the site. AOL Messenger had deep secrets spilling between chatrooms, feeding nutrients to branches that extended to other limbs. Time zones were a muddle of logging in/off alerts across states and continents. Strangers seeped into lives they’ll never meet.
Under the name of LoVe5StRuCk from January 2008 to September 2009, I messaged a boy named Elijah, who lived in southwestern Texas, who was also thirteen (supposedly), who was seemingly my only friend when my real-life best friend failed me.
As soon as I got home from middle school, I opened my Sony VAIO laptop—which could only remain at my father’s house; my mother thought laptops were for older kids—and sat in a neon-green-cushioned papasan from Pier 1, waiting for him to get home and message about his shit day at school, to which I would one-up him and say I was lonely as hell, what’s new. But when sadness got too heavy, I dropped in my weird sense of humor, and he understood my life more than anyone I physically came across during my days. I shared my short stories fictionalized on real events; he talked about his friends in band and sent pictures of them and his family. I felt connected to him, even tried to make plans to meet, two stupid teenagers ignoring the Do Not Talk To Internet Strangers rule, but then—
Eventually the talking stopped. Eventually I was back to being fraught for any sort of exchange. I had almost caught the end of someone’s branch, but a raindrop shook me off and drowned me in the conduits of other neglected, one-sided conversations.
Swimming through the channels was a kaleidoscope of not knowing where you’d land next. Imagine floating on your back along the leaves of a crowned canopy. You are only a speck traveling like everyone else, only they have the equipment to tug over and catch a place to rest. The community inside that section welcomes them. While the world lets go, you keep swirling around, trying to find a hand to drag you in. Missed connections swiveled as often as the kaleidoscope cranked into new reflections.
Toward the end of Eighth Grade, Kayla sits with a group of seniors in the mall’s food court, and we see how hard she tries to inject herself into the conversation, how others have picked up on how painfully awkward she is. Kayla mimics facial expressions, laughs when a confusing joke is made, desperately tries to follow along. She’s inside, but not really. There’s a force field between the cheeky young adults and the quiet teenager.
It was the same way in classes, in group assignments and pairing up to check homework; in softball locker rooms before a game and sleepovers where I didn’t know the girl’s friends outside of school. I wanted to be included, but someone had to include me. Nonverbal invitations were hard to discern. People didn’t really want me in their lives, so I stopped trying.
Under the username of emtown, Tumblr became my social hub during college. Though I didn’t interact with anyone on there or belong to a fandom, I scoured #personal tags for interview questions: 55 interesting questions to drop into someone’s inbox, made this for all the bored people!✧, send me a number. Without waiting for an impersonal follower to ask, I’d fill out an entire post of answers. No one was going to ask anyway. For years all inquiries about “where was your first kiss” had been left blank and “what scares you most” had always been oblivion. One question, no matter what number it was in the post, had one simple response.
2. Do you miss anyone? 83. Do you miss anyone right now? 104. Do you miss anyone from your past?
Yes. yes. yes.
There was no point in answering these to an audience that never browsed my blog, but it served as an archive of a self growing into adulthood. The Internet had been my coming-of-age novel. The pictures that became photographs, the evolution of personal interests into personal dislikes, the industrialization of discovering someone almost entirely new from the same shell, all of it is online. All of it invites one person to investigate my story.
I wished I didn’t have to miss people, because then it’d mean they weren’t missing in the first place. But sometimes I missed the idea of a friend rather than an actual friend. The girls I grew up with had all moved on, gone to different colleges and states, and I didn’t bother keeping in touch with them. They’d have to talk to me first. And that’s why no one had stayed behind. I didn’t really want them. I wanted real memories with someone else so I wouldn’t remember I was lonely.
A classmate pitched a two-hour job for $100: judge a middle school cheerleading tryout. As soon as I walked into the school, knots of dread bundled into my thighs. Watching the kids clustering toward buses and parents reminded me of how trapped I felt then, standing outside my own school without anyone around. My classmate led me to the gym and I was overwhelmed with déjà vecu, immediately reliving the mornings sat on the bleachers, waiting for the day to already be over.
Flanked between two other college students chatting about their education courses—“how’d you do on your exam?” “what are you teaching your kids this week?” etc.—I felt left out, not having anything to contribute to the conversation. It had always been like that. I constantly had trouble inserting myself into other people’s lives, failing to gather the strength to pull myself out of the river and find shelter on nearby branches.
In groups of three and four, sixth and seventh graders either awkwardly or impressively ran their way into the center of the gym. I studied the overhyped confidence of the girls who obviously did cheer outside of school; I admired the courage of the ones who cringily stumbled to the beat, their eyes flitting to the side to catch up to the routine. Girl #5 snagged my attention, this meek blonde desperately attempting to smile while silently cheering the chant. In no way did she remind me of my younger self: I never would’ve tried out in the first place. But there was something commendable on her end when compared to other just-as-bad auditioners—she really did try to make it a good experience, even if she figured she wasn’t going to make the cut. I wished I had been as brave as her then. Not for cheerleading, but for choosing to participate after all.
When I came home one weekend from grad school, my mother had found a box of my old journals from public school and left them by my bed. From looking at the cover tearing off the spine, I knew there was so much pain in there.
The yellow notebook was a sixteen-year-old’s diary, which had excruciatingly melodramatic entries crying to go home. At the height of loneliness, after losing a best friend and failing to secure new ones that lasted more than a year, I wrote a letter to be opened when I returned to my hometown, the end date pushing itself back when more opportunities arrived. After a while, I stopped resenting my parents and the situation I was in. I made friends in the later years of college, good ones. The kind that stayed. The kind that pulled me out of the channel and stopped the kaleidoscope from revolving.
A part of me wanted to burn the box, obliterate who I was in the past. I wasn’t that person anymore. I learned to stop using people for happiness. I learned that everyone else had a life and it was okay if I didn’t belong in theirs. I was no longer the girl writing for help on the classroom walls and erasing it when the bell dismissed the period.
But still. Capsules are meant to be roots no one wants to dig up.