First, a modern-day love story. His Tinder bio purports to his hatred of small talk, so I respond with a carefully crafted “yh small talk suxxx.” This leads to a drink, which eventually leads to a changing of relationship statuses on Facebook and a deleting of Tinder, which leads to a mixtape with hand drawn sleeve as a goodbye present. There’s a struggle to arrange Skype calls. And this eventually leads to a Facebook call in which we break up. When he hangs up, Facebook provides comfort in the form of five grey stars in a white box, asking me to rate my experience of their calling system.

I delete the messenger app from my phone. I take to Twitter as the new outlet for my repressed feelings of rejection, neatly siphoned off in a manageable 140 characters at a time. I download Tinder again, delete Tinder, re-download Tinder, delete it once more.

While I’m playing hard to get with the very interface of Tinder, one of my matches compliments my septum piercing, a message which I leave unread. They are friends with people who have me on Facebook, who also message me with the cryptic message: “Ur septum piercing is rad.” I leave it to the morning, not understanding where it is coming from. Anyway, I’m writing an essay. Tinder and I haven’t been on speaking terms for about a month, most likely because this time it was making me question the point of sending poorly punctuated messages to people I saw at ARCSOC or across the room at queer drinks.

"I become so hyper-aware of the lives I’m not living and the people I’m not seeing or messaging back that I stop liking where my life is right now"

I go back home after Michaelmas. I re-download Tinder. Read through missed conversations. People think various aspects of my appearance are worthy of note. I see that I have five messages from the same person, each of them: “Ur septum piercing is rad.” Oh. Two Facebook conversations from two months ago suddenly make a lot more sense. Oops. I show a friend from home when we go to the pub. That friend finds me on Tinder a few days later and sends me 128 ‘Ur septum piercing is rad’ messages on the 24th December. Following this aberration of human interaction, I return to Cambridge, thinking I’d left declarations of rad septum piercings behind me.

Then the phrase pops up in an article. An article which casts me as the cold-hearted girl brutally rejecting, ghosting and shutting down any acknowledgement of the writer. I don’t remember auditioning for this role, but it seems I got the part, and can now be held as an exemplary act of how not to care about other people’s feelings. My septum piercing may be rad, but it’s now tarnished with the reputation of being the one who rejects other people.

"I oversimplify myself because it’s easier. I treat myself as an article that’s TL;DR"

I’ve deleted Tinder again, and now it’s kept company in the realms of my rejected social media by Twitter and Instagram. Tinder, Twitter and Instagram form a Bermuda Triangle where my sense of self goes off the radar. On these sites, I become a manic pixie mean-girl to the people I don’t respond to, writing a storyline where I only care about food, good vibes, and Buffy. I oversimplify myself because it’s easier. I treat myself as an article that’s TL;DR.

Certain aspects of social media have turned me into a reflection of other people: a shadowy figure who struggles to speak to people in real life. I forget how to communicate without a set of cactus stickers or super-likes. I become so hyper-aware of the lives I’m not living and the people I’m not seeing or messaging back that I stop liking where my life is right now. I turn into a smaller version of myself, and I turn other people into smaller versions of themselves, too. I think they are rejecting me if they don’t reply to my messages. I’m seeing so many selective insights into other people’s lives that I can’t hear myself think, can’t hear a voice to drown out the one that cries ‘they’ve rejected you’ if they don’t respond to tagged memes or like my photos or send me 128 unprovoked messages.

Get rejected for feminism

This voice crying out ‘they don’t like you’ got a lot quieter after about the first week of being off social media. A disclaimer: ‘off social media’ doesn’t include Facebook for me… Zuckerberg has cultivated a crafty monopoly. How can I delete Facebook when I still need to find ARCSOC tickets? Anyway, without Twitter-Instagram-Tinder, if people stopped talking to me on messenger, or when I saw them in person, I knew it was because they were busy or just didn’t want to reply, not an inherent condemnation of my worth.

I think you can only be rejected when you allow yourself to feel rejected. If you recognise the limits of Tinder, and the futility of avoiding missed connection – even when we can be connected all the time – you recognise other ways to value yourself. Yes, my septum piercing is rad. No, I wasn’t rejecting you. I’m just trying to be here, without having to perform through a filter of witty one-liners which lack both conventional punctuation and any understanding of the autonomy of others. When I see things solely through my phone screen, I can’t see the effect it has on my perception of self and what I begin to expect from other people.

I have rejection stories from social media, but it’s not for me to blame those people for ‘rejecting’ me. I’m not entitled to anything from them just because they signed in, or swiped right. Getting some space from social media means I can stop seeing others as supporting roles representing a binary of rejection or acceptance in the fiction where I’m the main character. Looking at relationships like this is much more complicated than a simple swiping left or right, but honestly? It’s pretty rad