TikTok’s rapid-fire cycle of memes, challenges, and billions of active users offers us an infinite number of ways to express ourselves. If it’s something bad, it can often be dressed up as a joke. So, what happens when teens bring trauma to the platform?
Photo: @trapmoneybella, @kmad__, @zowielynnnn, @madisonbruno/TikTok When I was a teenager I dated a bad guy. I broke up with him when I went to college, and he, still living in the suburb where we grew up, took to calling me up to 100 times a day, leaving voice-mails that ranged from sobbing to screaming to whispered threats. At the time I had this burner Windows phone that looked and worked like a calculator — it didn’t let me block numbers, so the calls kept coming.
About a month ago, a new trend emerged on TikTok. It goes like this: a teenager, usually a young girl, plays a voice-mail from what we’re told is a cheating or abusive ex-partner. In some cases, the person on the voice-mail is whining, blubbering, begging — “Please … you’re the only fucking person that actually cares about me and pushes me in the right direction. Without you, I’m just going to go back to fucking hell.
I watched about 30 of these videos, my amusement at the girl dancing to her ex’s bad SoundCloud tracks devolving into concern and then fear as TikTok fed me other videos. I shut the app after watching one girl dance to a mix of cruel names and actual death threats.
Most of the other teens I spoke to echoed the girls, a lot of them assuring me that they were just joining in on a fun trend. Some added that the videos let them publicly shame their exes.
But consider Tenley, an 18-year-old college freshman now, who told Rolling Stone that she’d gotten a two-day restraining order against the ex in the voice-mail. She tells me over text that she’s still a little scared he will see the video and retaliate. Maddie, meanwhile, was one of the girls dancing to a message in which her ex threatens to come over and kill her if she doesn’t answer her phone.
As we continue to live and breathe these platforms, the topic of how social media is changing how we emote will no doubt be pathologized to death. But TikTok trauma-dancing is a distilled version of something we’ve been seeing for years now: emotion — anxiety, depression, anger, joy, love — made into a focused piece of content to be presented to the world, via the Über-public forum of the social network.
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