I know it sounds funny to use the word “love” in relation to a social media app, but the truth is, that is the feeling I have for TikTok.
When it went dark this weekend in my home country of the US this weekend while I sat in my ex-pat home in Canada, I was reminded of a truth that spurred me to write my book – love and loss are bedfellows. You cannot have one without the other. To love means we must reconcile this.
I joined the app during the pandemic after a suggestion that it might be a good place to share my writing and teaching. I responded at the time, “The app with the dancing kids?” But I was told it was so much more than that. I trusted, and joined.
The first content I created there was pretty cringy, but I have never deleted any of it. And yet I’ve deleted many old Instagram posts that I no longer feel aligned with. And that is what points out the difference between TikTok and Instagram — one feels like a place I can be myself and the other is like a performance (albeit on my insta feed, I try very much to craft a performance piece based on authenticity).
This is why I say that TikTok saved me from the very first brick I laid on my fyp.
It saved me when I was alone in a new country during a time when you couldn’t tell if a stranger was smiling beneath their mask. It saved me when I was reeling in the decision of whether or not to end a marriage with my partner of 10 years. It saved me when I felt the modern paradox of loneliness – one defined by being surrounded by neighbors whom I can only count as my community based on sheer proximity and not interconnectedness.
In those days of wanting to see a shift in how we all live, TikTok helped me feel like I had just walked into a party with the coolest, funniest, weirdest, smartest people I could meet. It gave me a home.
Though my posts have gathered some kind of following, I’m by no means TikTok famous by TikTok standards. But my first viral posts were there, and I felt seen by the right people. As I posted over the last four years, I found a place to target the massive energy of creation that lives inside me at a time when the world seemed bent on destruction.
And I wasn’t alone.
This very same experience was happening across the millions of creators on this app. So much so that Google’s Year in Search 2022 highlighted the burgeoning creative drive (and featured one of my TikToks attesting to the truth that we are on the precipice of a renaissance).
After all, we’ve been through the dark ages before and the one thing we know for sure about nature is that balance inevitably comes, whether we like it or not.
This app made space for us. Through creativity and connection. By holding space for an awakening of comedy, DIY, homesteading, philosophy, poetry, music, dance, and self-expression set to a “get ready with me” breakdown of why you need to stop texting your ex.
So you can understand why these past few days of having the app used as a political lever have been kind of unsettling.
Creativity and connection have always led to a sense of hope, a sense of purpose. These two very human expressions give us a reason to smile, a reason to get out of the house and catch a walk in the sunshine. And TikTok gave us those generously.
But let me be clear – TikTok gave us nothing. My love for the app has nothing to do with the app itself. The developers didn’t do this, we did. We saw a chance to create, to connect, to share our gifts. So it shows that when we are given the chance to self-express, we self-express.
But just as I would advise you not to make the home of your love another person, but instead to see that you created it and simply found a reflection of it somewhere, I advise the same here with the app. It’s neutral if we’re lucky. But as all the pro-Trump statements are showing us, we can’t even guarantee that much right now.
But even if it was just a lifeless set of coding, I mourned TikTok when it went dark. I spent Saturday night scrolling, watching the goodbye messages and final moments with the wild and revolutionary people with whom I shared a digital space. Then around 10 pm, my feed completely changed. Suddenly I was watching videos of middling creators who were clearly just starting out and hadn’t yet made it an art form. I stumbled upon a video of five teenagers taking turns self-consciously posing in front of a mirror. “Is this what TikTok is like now?” I cried out in the comments.
Like the prophecy has always pointed us to, something I love changed.
And here’s what I know about change — it happens. And the place it always happens, without fail, no matter what we do to cling, is in love.
I loved TikTok. I still love it. But things are changing, and I’m not sure it will stay home for us anymore. So we must gather our courage and recognize that here’s yet another place where our desire for sure footedness fails.
Love is a beautiful and mysterious beast of a thing. It asks us to go all in, double down. Yet it never stays exactly as you found it. There’s no forever. No always. I’m sorry, but this is a beautiful, horrible truth that we have to learn to hold.
But let me soften the blow. The desire for forever only hurts if you think of it as a sort of bell jar that captures whatever it has inside and protects them from the outside air.
But when you begin to see that the promise of forever actually exists in the imprint an experience made on you, it becomes suddenly easier to trust the madness of letting your heart fall open.
We will be forever changed by what we love. And what we love will forever change us. That is as much a balm as it is a warning. Love what will fuel you, not what you seek to cling to. Love love itself, rather than the object you laid eyes on.
In six weeks time TikTok might look completely different. But the same could be said for governments, relationships, bank accounts. Nothing stays the same way, but having touched beauty once means we will always know it.
TikTok isn’t here to love you back. But what is here to remind you of your power is the audacity of millions of people who decided to create amidst the metaphorical burning buildings of a falling empire. Here is the spirit of millions who laughed their way through Covid and cried at the elections and taught each other how to grow carrots just as easily as they taught how to avoid face recognition software at protests.
We did that. We did that together. And while the corner we gathered on is moving ground, we are forever imprinted with everything we gained there. Whenever we love again (because we will, if we are brave) we will do so from the lens we learned on that app. It will never be taken from us.
It’s fitting that I wrote this on the notes app of my phone, lying in bed in the posture I often take when I go for my nightly TikTok stroll. It’s a posture that sends me directly into deep relaxation. I’m choosing to write today rather than scroll. To create something in the medium I know rather than consume. And in the act of creation I feel something soothing the ache inside me that has been there since the day I was born that said, “I’m ready for the revolution.”
What we did is going somewhere. We don’t know where yet. But we do know that when we get to the next place we’ll eventually realize we need to go somewhere else too.
This clinging, this desperation, this belief that an app – or a lover – holds our salvation is all fantasy. But love is real. It exists everywhere, within everyone. It opens us to creativity and self-expression. It shows us our inherent value and worth. It gives us a reason to feel safe in a very stormy sea.
So please, keep falling in love. With a person, with an app, with an oak tree you pass on your daily walk (IYKYK). As you do, let yourself remember that this is the resistance you’ve been waiting for. This is the flood of life within you that no corporation can ever own, sell, or kill. Remember that you have blood beneath your skin – blood that signals the passion and fire that first prompted your great-great ancestors to stand up on the savannah and wonder why.
This blood that warms us on a cold inauguration day whispers to us – everything you’re learning in this renaissance of human creation is something you’ve always known.
May that love give birth to something beautiful.
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