magnification

 (this is an exercise that I did in my creative nonfiction class. I am writing about many of my social media pursuits, and the idea of this exercise was to take one sentence and magnify it as much as possible. My sentence was [i have always loved social media]. this is a super rough first draft written in fifteen minutes, dont take this as an example of my best writing pls)

I was a tall and fat twelve-year-old with long, perpetually greasy, mousey brown hair and two (sometimes three) friends at school surrounded by twelve-year-old lacrosse prodigies who owned every item from Vineyard Vines and Ivory Ella. I sat in the back of my classes, silently ignoring my teachers, nearly failing math and history, waiting for the next time I could check my phone, waiting for a moment where I could pretend I needed to go to the bathroom to scroll through Twitter. I silently chuckled in the math wing bathroom stall every day to messages sent to me by my inappropriately aged online boyfriend, or the reblog tags on my musical theatre Tumblr account. I hated my life off-screen. I had no purpose in real life, I didn't know how to talk to anyone except the girl who sat next to me in chorus class, and nobody wanted to talk to me. To be fair, who would want to talk to the girl who sits with a group of friends who don't like her and stares at her phone all of lunch? Social media was a way to get away from that. Twitter was where I’d get all of my pop culture news (it still is), Instagram was where I could live vicariously through the girls on my feed (it still is), and Tumblr was where I could talk about. My interests without being mocked by people who don’t share my obsessions (it still is), and Wattpad was where I could show my creativity, and express my love for writing (thank god it isn’t anymore). My phone was there for me when my grandmother died, it was there for me when I went through my first breakup, when I had my first panic attack, when I got cheated on, when my mom broke her ribs, when boys at school would shove me, when my brother would ignore me, when my favorite celebrities died, when my favorite musicals closed, my phone brought me comfort—but more importantly, it brought me distraction. My iPhone 5 was my first true love.