What TikTok Taught Me About Grief

By: Scott Luther

Social media has been - in most cases rightly - criticized as a lot of different things: frivolous, performative, toxic, a hotbed of narcissistic indulgences, a menace to mental health.

Against that backdrop, it’s hard to imagine that any kind of meaningful connection could be made, period, never mind connecting with strangers through complex emotions like grief, loss, processing trauma or untangling identity.

Digging deeper, we found that humanity is still alive and well on social - it just needs to be given permission.

Content that focuses on elements of grief, loss, and self-discovery is indeed rare on social media and often goes un-commented upon, unacknowledged, and overlooked. But responses to these moments – where someone reached out to console, to explain, to stand up to bigotry – were particularly poignant.

These everyday acts of humanity and empathy showed others a strength they wished they could live up to.

Out of 1,198 clips shared, less than 1% contained themes related to loss, grief, mental health challenges, or identity-conflict

When people are at a loss, leaders rise.

People have a natural bias towards personal comfort, so it makes some sense on the surface that they may be quick to “look away” from people trying to share or process emotions in challenging moments. All too often these moments go unacknowledged and unanswered. But when they do, when those moments get shared publicly and the first genuine, human, empathetic response volley’s back - it opens a floodgate of response (both in volume and in resonance).

This emotional-first-responder helps model ~a~ way to reach out for sympathy/comfort/shared outrage/processing; and that begets more outreach and other responses.

“I’m so tired of feeling helpless as a parent.”

— @That1Crazy72

Despite the public narrative around social media focusing on (some) people’s innate desire to be the center of attention - the spectacle that people create to try and earn fame - more often than not, content that lands well with others is focused on someone else.

Even when revealing deeply personal truths, it’s most successful (in connecting with other people), when done in a way that is externally processed. In a way that’s inviting others to see themselves in what gets shared.

The silly side gets more air-time, but the resonance of someone helping comfort another is felt deeply

Trauma hits from many angles.

“I’m so much more disabled than I thought” is a gut-wrenching statement to hear.

Offered in a genuine moment of self-awareness (self-revelation, even), in the video below the author KC Davis @DomesticBlisters walks through her own processing of personal executive dysfunction, which has lead to a lifetime of constantly uncovering coping strategies to simply get through the day.

It is truly remarkable.

The way KC walks through the realization that her experience of life is dramatically different from the vast majority of people around her - revealed through the recognition that meaning of the word “habit” is completely inverse her personal experience of completing any daily task - is communicated in a way that evokes (1) a clear understanding of her lived experience, (2) offers others who have a similar brain a way to process that different worldview, and (3) gives concrete examples of what this means for her life moving forward with this new understanding.