Renegade Renegade
- Chisomebi (Somy) Eze
- Oct 25, 2023
- 2 min read
2020. That year was a struggle for me in too many ways that I can count. The year of Covid, BLM and TikTok,
Let’s clarify that I was one of the OG’s of TikTok in 2019, an app labelled as ‘weird’, and if you had it, people would scrunch their faces at you funny. In my old school, sometimes I was labelled the ‘Cringe TikToker’, but I didn’t care because I knew they were missing out. They didn’t know that it was the best part of TikTok before the normies joined along in 2020. And that’s when all hell broke loose for me. No longer was this clock app a great way to be silly without being judged, but now it became a thirst trap app and boy, was I thirsty.
“Renegade! Renegade!” the 15-second audio on my phone replayed as this tall skinny, smiling white girl moved her arms to the beat of the music rather subtly. Still, it was perfect, apparently because I had noticed she received like 9 million likes. It felt like she was dancing to look pretty and not to have fun. Distinctively, that was when things started to change.
I’m not salty about it now, but I was very jealous then. Why? and how? were words that popped up every single time. My questions boomed louder when I found that the original creator of the dance had been black and had danced with much more effort and power but received not even a pinch of likes as the white girl.
It became evident that it was a ‘pretty privilege’ thing. Not only did I realise this, but so did the rest of the app, and people were no longer dancing crazy or doing silly and creative transitions with their camera, but now it was looking at the phone rather flirtatiously as they danced or didn’t. And there was a trend. Of course, there was.
This clock app favoured skinny white girls tenfolds over. And this affected how I looked at myself too much that it was embarrassing. I lost tonnes of weight. I ate less and worked out a LOT. Now I’ve ticked the skinny checkbox. I had straightened my hair, so that box also got a tick. Now what was remaining had been the white part...
That was impossible, but I had attempted things that makes current me ashamed. And it hadn’t worked...obviously. Thankfully. My self-worth at this time had leaked down the drain. I obsessed over a billion videos on ‘how to be pretty’, ‘how to get likes and followers, ’ and ‘how to be TikTok famous.’ These videos had swallowed my mind. My only goal was to be pretty, feel pretty or at least look it. Looking back, I definitely was, but I didn’t know that then, and my heart breaks continually for 14-year-old me.
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