There is a moment, right after posting a picture on Instagram, when my heart pounds with expectation.
For a fleeting moment, I'm not 31-year-old me, but 13-year-old Rachel — embarrassed, self-conscious, craving acceptance from anyone who'll give it to me.
The like count on my Instagram post is an unflinching zero. A number that I feel so keenly that my finger wavers over the "delete post" button. What if my selfie gets no likes at all? Why won't the guy I fancy like my selfies? Do I post too many selfies? (Answer: yes, definitely.)
Perhaps this story sounds silly. Frivolous, even. But when your self-esteem is low, and your mental health not on tip-top shape, Instagram can feel like the most toxic place on earth.
So, when I read the words "WHY WON'T YOU LIKE MY SELFIES??????" in poet Charly Cox's new book Validate Me, I let out an audible gasp.
When I admitted the above story to Cox over the phone, she knew exactly what I was talking about.
"It's so silly isn't it? Because I certainly would never look at somebody else's numbers on their post and say, 'Hmm, embarrassing,'" she told me. "Nobody else cares. Realistically, nobody cares about you as much as you care about yourself. Particularly in that weird digital reality."
It's a rare thing to read a book and feel seen by a writer. But Cox has been capturing what young people — and particularly young women — are going through ever since she wrote her first book of poetry She Must Be Mad in 2018.
Her first book — which had the words "for every girl who feels too much" scrawled on the blurb — explored her struggles with her mental health, her body image, and dating in the age of apps.
Cox's second book is "an account of a life lived online." It's a book for anyone who's ever swiped to feel less alone, felt the sting of self-comparison when they scrolled through their timeline, or only liked their own body when others tapped 'like' on a two-dimensional image of it.
How did she get so beautiful So struck with all the sharpest planes? I'm stuck down in a lasting pain What I would give I wouldn't eat To have that face, even her feet
As with many writers' best ideas, Cox's kernel of inspiration for the second book grew from an uncomfortable realisation about herself.
"Very similar to everyone, I have lived my life on my phone. Since the first book came out, I suddenly realised that everything that I was doing was orchestrated for an audience and the digital gaze that wasn't real and wasn't my own," said Cox. "I have anxiety at the best of times but I suddenly felt this increase of pressure and anxiety and nervousness around who I was, what I was doing, what I was saying, and what I was thinking all the time.
"I realised that it was this constant outsourcing of validation that was in no way coming from an internal desire of wanting to be loved. It was like this machine-bred fear of what people I don't know and don't care about think of me. And that was seeping into my everyday life in terms of into my relationships and into my ideas on politics," she added.
"For so long I'd been good at trusting my gut, and having a really solid internal moral compass on who I am, what I think, and what I believe in. And I really started to second guess all of my opinions and how I felt, who I wanted to be, and who I came across as, and it just got to the point where I had a breakdown in February."
Cox says that breakdown wasn't single-handedly caused by her relationship with her online life, but the digital burnout she'd been feeling certainly played a significant role in it. She described her state of existing prior to February as "being a machine and also a human being."
Millennial burnout is a topic we've talked about a great deal since the publication of Anne Helen Petersen's viral essay on how millennials became "the burnout generation." One sentence in particular in the essay encapsulates how this burnout intersects with our digital lives: "My refusal to respond to a kind Facebook DM is thus symptomatic of the sheer number of calls for my attention online: calls to read an article, calls to promote my own work, calls to engage wittily or defend myself from trolls or like a relative’s picture of their baby."
Digital burnout is a type of exhaustion that can arise from overuse of digital technologies. That can mean spending too much time on your smartphone, in front of a laptop, and participating in the digital economy. Cox delves into her own experience of digital burnout in a piece of prose entitled "Switching Off."
My fear of texts, emails, calls, notifications has now become physical. It's difficult to explain without likening the incoming vibration to a giant mythic monster that wants to devour me. Shit. It's ringing again. Even if I know it's a friend asking for coffee, my brain re-translates that information and swells it into panic. Hot nasty panic.
Over the phone, I told Cox that I'd recently gone through a mental health rough patch. I'd taken a step back from social media, purely because I couldn't think of anything to say. I felt burnt out but I couldn't shake the feeling that I should still be posting stuff on social media. I needed to participate in the digital economy.
"I can completely relate to what you just said," she said, confirming she'd experienced a similar urge to keep up digital appearances. "I wasn't making my life for myself, and all of my healthy coping mechanisms have always been to trust my gut, write poetry, go to the doctor, seek advice from my friends, and confide in people that I know have my best interests at heart."
Cox's work can be characterised as radically vulnerable. But that vulnerability, and the process of opening oneself up to strangers, isn't easy. Cox said the response to her writing, particularly about mental health, has been "bloody overwhelming, to be frank," and also troubling.
"It's frightening because it's really shone a light for me on how broken our system is globally. Not just within the UK but around the world," she told me. Cox is alarmed that young women feel that their first port of call in asking for advice about mental health is not seeing a medical professional, but DMing a poet on Twitter or Instagram.
In the UK, universities are struggling to keep up with the increased demand for mental health services. A fact that's been thrown into sharp relief after more than 12 Bristol University students died by suicide in the last three years.
"What I find really troubling is that people really try to spin it as, 'Isn't it amazing what response you've had from all these young women who totally get it,'" says Cox. "I think it's really grim to suggest that my ego should feel massaged from that, because it just makes me incredibly sad.
"I don't love it," she added. "If that's why I'm selling books then I wish I wasn't the bestselling debut poet of last year."
Validate Me by Charly Cox, published HQ, HarperCollins), is available now.
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