Losing My Face
What really happens when you quit Social Media
It happened on a quiet day in 2025. Something in me tilted that day.
All I’d ever dreamed of was to be a story teller. I have tried many different ways in the pursuit of fulfilling this dream, but nothing ever stuck like writing.
Yet, if I wanted to be a writer, consensus was that I had to also be a public person on at least one of the larger social media platforms. Better still if I were present on multiple.
I work in marketing. This is what I do daily, I told myself. How hard can it be?
I guess it’s no surprise to any of you who are themselves writers (or, let’s be honest, just any person who has lived through the horrifying rise of social media) that it is, in fact, very hard.
Constantly analysing and staying on top of micro trends, acting as your online persona because the real you is not marketable enough and inventing progressively stupid ways to somehow advertise your writing in video form—it just got to me.
I hated how much time it took from what I actually loved. How much practise in the craft I wanted to hone I simply didn’t get because it was spent on cutting short form videos only 10 people would even scroll past.
The tipping point, however, was that I hated my face more every single time I saw it on screen.
I didn’t think much of it in the beginning. The enhancing algorithms of our phone cameras have become very imposing, I attributed it to a questionable update.
But it got worse.
When I would go in to edit videos, my face simply looked wrong. Not just slightly off. Wrong.
One time it looked like my features melted into each other. My eyes dripped down on my cheeks, my nose and lips lost their form.
It went away though, when I hit publish.
The next time my video self smiled at me with teeth I don’t have. Sharp ones, like a predator’s. Too many for my narrow mouth.
Things like that kept happening. Some days, my eyes were gone. Others, my hair fell off. Still others my skin was befallen with a sickness, all white with thick purple veins pulsing beneath it.
I couldn’t show it to anyone. Every time I published the videos, they looked normal again. Even saving them to show to someone later didn’t work. And when I called someone over the moment I saw the grotesque effects I blinked and they were gone.
At this point I was convinced I was going insane.
I reinstalled the software, tried a different one, even wiped my phone completely for a fresh start. Nothing helped. Not even a brand new phone.
The macabre changes on my face kept happening.
So, I stopped publishing videos. Stopped taking them altogether. Stopped using my phone’s camera.
I wanted to get away from all of it. From constantly exposing myself to the world, from this self-aggrandizement and glorification of things I didn’t even believe in.
I deleted it. Every account, every app.
At first, it felt better. I could breath again. My chest no longer felt like it was constantly hammered on.
But not days after this purge, I noticed it transpiring into the real world.
My mirror blurred my face now. I thought I needed a new prescription but everything else was sharp as ever.
Yet every time I looked into it, I saw less of myself.
Even photos others took of me didn’t show my face, only scratches and weird marks where it should be.
These days, I don’t think anyone still knows what I look like. My face has entirely disappeared. And with it, everyone who ever knew me.
Author’s note: This is my overly dramatic way of introducing my new profile picture. The person you see on it is me. If those scratch marks happened like described above or simply by chipping away at a printed version of the photo with a knife, I’ll let you decide. In any case, there is a person behind this publication, not a bot. Albeit one that is uncomfortable with showing her face on the internet.
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It took me way too long to realize this was fiction, haha. I thought you wanted to complain about marketing a bit, and the melting face was a metaphor. I was reading and going "Yup, relatable"
This is a lovely, vulnerable thing for you to share... thank you for articulating this feeling that I am sure so many us have, in various forms.
Love the new profile pic too. 💜