The Twitter account @SoSadToday first appeared in 2012, relaying the thoughts of an unnamed young woman with a pronounced anxiety disorder and a dark sense of humor about it. Topics like depression, panic attacks, and feelings of romantic doom all served as fodder for the creator’s stylized expressions of feminine despair: “sometimes i remember i exist and i’m just like ‘gross’ ”; “every ten seconds a girl feels insecure and that girl is me.” She hid sudden emotional escalations inside disaffected quips (“excited to get over you by being obsessed with someone else who doesn’t want me”) and paired Internet slang ironically with feel-good clichés: “forgive and forget jk.” She celebrated cues of femininity even as she mocked them, like a taste for Diet Coke or shopping as a form of self-care. (“maybe if i buy this shit i don’t need i’ll be a whole person.”) She warped the lyrics of popular songs and inverted brand slogans to reflect her self-loathing: “maybe she’s born with it, maybe she’s comparing her insides to other people’s outsides.” Bolstered by replies from celebrities like Katy Perry, the account picked up legions of online fans. At last count @SoSadToday had more than three hundred thousand followers.
Thanks in part to the account’s anonymity, @SoSadToday’s messages seemed to speak collectively for a certain demographic of young, female Twitter users, those who felt emotions very deeply and were also interested in curating a distinct expression of those emotions online. In 2014, the artist Audrey Wollen explained her “Sad Girl Theory,” the idea that sharing feelings across the Internet was not necessarily narcissism but a form of feminist resistance. “Girls’ sadness is not passive, self-involved, or shallow,” she told the magazine Dazed. “It is a gesture of liberation, it is articulate and informed, it is a way of reclaiming agency over our bodies, identities, and lives.” The year before, the artists Alicia Eler and Kate Durbin had made a similar argument in identifying the “Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic,” and Lindsay Zoladz, writing for Pitchfork, identified Lana del Rey as a kind of mascot for defiantly sad girls, her extravagantly forlorn music a corrective after years of false empowerment ballads. Common to all of these theories of Internet sadness was the idea that displays of vulnerability were no less honest or real for having made the act of displaying them the point. The display was both a symptom and a coping mechanism. And @SoSadToday was the online voice who expressed this idea better than anyone else, the one whose followers found in her comments what they’d been meaning to say.
Then, in May of 2015, the creator of @SoSadToday decided to reveal her identity in an interview with Rolling Stone. She’s a California-based poet named Melissa Broder—in her words “older than a teen, but not disgustingly old” (she is in her mid-thirties, but has not revealed her exact age)—who started the account while working as an assistant director of social media at Penguin Random House, writing poetry on the side, and looking for an outlet to write about the increasingly intensifying symptoms of her anxiety disorder. (Her fourth collection of poetry, “Last Sext,” will be released in June.) Now, Broder explained to Rolling Stone, she was publishing a book of personal essays, also titled “So Sad Today,” based on the Twitter account but under her real name_._ That book was published last week.
The essays in Broder’s collection—some are new, some were previously published under the So Sad Today pseudonym on Vice—are similar in tone to her tweets, and address the same constellation of subjects: panic attacks, nail polish, addictions to every possible chemical, sexual identities made of equal parts fetish and anticipatory disappointment. The essays, too, are full of short declarations and displays of emotion that are familiar from the @SoSadToday account. Many of their titles—“One Text Is Too Many and a Thousand Are Never Enough,” “Keep Your Friends Close but Your Anxiety Closer”—might as well be tweets. The piece titled “Help Me Not Be a Human Being” is not so much an essay as a list of emotional disasters, each punctuated by the phrase “a love story” to prove it was anything but: “That’s not the clitoris: a love story”; “Let’s pretend you are capable of being who I think you need to be: a love story.”
But if “So Sad Today” attempts to preserve the essence of the Twitter account, it also adheres to the more straightforward conventions of memoir. Where @SoSadToday was the device of a universal sad girl, the book conveys the experiences of a single struggling woman. Broder was born and raised in Pennsylvania. Her anxiety disorder appeared around the age of twelve. She became addicted to smoking in her teens, to alcohol and drugs in college, and she got sober at the age of twenty-five. In the first piece in the collection, Broder provides a “So Sad Today” origin myth of sorts, writing that she was all needs and neuroses from birth: “Day one on earth I discovered how to not be enough.” She explores her relationship to the Internet, describing her online habits as its own kind of drug: “The Internet has given me the dopamine, attention, amplification, connection, and escape I seek. It has also distracted me, disappointed me, paralyzed me, and catalyzed a false sense of self . . . It has increased my solipsism and made me even more incapable of coping with reality.” In the essay “I Want to Be a Whole Person but Really Thin,” Broder chronicles her long struggles with disordered eating habits, describing herself as “an eater of numbers,” with counting calories yet another form of compulsion. “It’s just an illusion of control, really, but that illusion is everything. It makes me feel safe. It gives me stillness in my mind. All I’ve ever wanted is peace.” This sudden leap from the mundane to the existential—from caloric intake to inner serenity—is signature @SoSadToday; there really is no distance between the two things, Broder seems to be saying.
The common thread running through the essays in “So Sad Today” is Broder’s willingness to confess even those parts of her life that she considers shameful or embarrassing. We learn about the panic she felt after her first Botox injections and the withdrawal symptoms she experienced after switching antidepressants; we are informed of how she feels about her neck and her inner labia. (The latter is asymmetrical and has grown darker in color over the years; this causes Broder some concern.) We read long, inventive, and only modestly arousing sext-message exchanges between Broder and a man she met over the Internet: “I want u to @ me while you lick my clit. Then as I come I will say yr name over and over and respond to your @ that way b/c I don’t @ on twitter and everyone knows that.” (Even Broder’s textual foreplay is steeped in Web vernacular.) In an essay I had a hard time getting through, titled “My Vomit Fetish, Myself,” Broder begins by telling us, “One way to feel isolated is to unintentionally develop an odd sexual fetish at a very young age.”
One way to fend off isolation is to confess. Works of confessional writing, especially those written by and for women, are as much an attempt to connect as a way to unload; as Adrienne Rich once said, “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” When authors like Kathy Acker and Virginie Despentes explore taboos like incest and violence, they are confronting deeply engrained ideas about sex and morality; when Chris Kraus writes about a “conceptual fuck,” she explores the limits of our understandings of female sexual desire; and when Catherine Breillat writes about pornography, she is pushing us to consider the distance between what the eye sees and what the body feels. In recent years, writers such as Sheila Heti, Leslie Jamison, and Lena Dunham have published books and essays that confront ideas of self-surveillance, self-loathing, and self-respect with humor, sadness, and detailed descriptions of bodily functions, asking their readers to consider the boundaries that get placed around representations of women. The female authors who write about their sadness—whether as searingly as Sylvia Plath or couched in jokes like Broder—provide a language for other readers, a direction for likeminded women to point themselves in, a rope to climb over a wall.
Like her Twitter feed, Broder’s essays often left me with a sharp sense of feminine recognition. I would read her accounts of heartbreak, sexual dissatisfaction, and alienation and think, Same—the solitary reader’s equivalent of a fave or a retweet. But recognition is not the same as deep connection, and Broder’s preëmptively dismissive sense of humor just as often acted as a barrier keeping me out. “Once a cucumber turns into a pickle, you can’t turn it back into a cucumber, and I’ve been pickled by the Internet for a long time,” she writes, of her Internet addiction. When describing ending a toxic relationship, she writes, “If you really love yourself, you will block and unfollow the person on all social media,” before adding, “But if you really love yourself you probably aren’t reading this essay.” In “Keep Your Friends Close but Your Anxiety Closer,” Broder talks about her “funny mask,” the So Sad Today character a disguise that allows her to feel like she can get away with bare admissions. “If I’m going to alienate you, I want to curate that alienation. I want to craft the persona that turns you off. I don’t want the real me, my vulnerabilities and humanity, to leak out and make you run. I don’t want to have needs . . . So I deflect my vulnerability into humor or ‘wise platitudes.’ ”
There are limits to what personal essays can accomplish when they are written from behind such a sturdy wall of self-defense. Yet “So Sad Today” ’s shortcomings as memoir only made me more appreciative of what she has accomplished in the communal realm of Twitter. There, her veneer of lolzy insincerity is exactly what draws us in. It captures how so many of us communicate on social media, crafting a careful persona that hides and reveals. Slang as membership; diction, design, and disaffection as a kind of community. We don’t always have to say precisely what we feel in order to say something true.
