Van Newman

Even as a Millennial, I very much have a mental illness rooted in toxic thinking facilitated by social media. How I feel about my body and my work and my personality is entirely through the lens of how I imagine I’m being perceived by strangers online.

This is how it works: You’ve always wanted to be a writer, but instead you decide you should become a health care worker. You go to school for four years. You get a degree in social work. You are at your first day of your new job, listening to an orientation, and you realize you really did want to be a writer. You quit your job, go to the library

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The Internet lacks closure, not in some cloying therapeutic sense, but literally. At every moment a website can be surfed, linked, crawled, or refreshed by any one (or several million) of billions of browsers. The net isn't "read" like a book, "watched" like a movie, nor "attended" like the theater -- it is "browsed." The word itself suggests a... See more