TikTok Grief

and why I won't go back if Trump is the one to give it to us

I posted my first TikTok video in October of 2020. I went there because my high school students talked about it, and by then, I was feeling the distance between myself and them. They didn’t come to Zoom class; they went to TikTok, and I needed to see what that was all about. It didn’t take long for me to fall in love. As I often said, “It’s my favorite place on the internet.” But no one in my social circle understood. My ex-wife made fun of me for years. Even after we split up, she’d comment if I mentioned it. My current boyfriend, a fan of IG reels, didn’t really get it but didn’t judge. My best friend, however, worried about the Chinese government’s access to my data.

Even if my third place was full of people my real-life people didn’t know, instead of news or Netflix, I opened TikTok. Every day, I scrolled while cooking, doing dishes, and putting away laundry. Because of this habit, the algorithm offered me longer-form videos and always seemed to know me a little better than I knew myself. I stumbled onto ADHD content long before I suspected I might be undiagnosed with that particular neurodivergence. The doctors had labeled me bipolar in 2010, but by 2022, I was almost certain I’d been misdiagnosed. My current psychiatrist doesn’t believe in diagnoses. We practice Social Therapy, a modality created by Fred Newman and Lois Holtzman in the 1970s as a radical alternative to traditional therapy. The focus is on “building the group,” and I meet with others from various walks of life and with a variety of diagnoses. So I’ve felt no need to see a different doctor for a new label. Instead, I relied on critical thinking—heightened by all that TikTok analysis—to better understand myself.

Through social therapy and other communities, I have real people in my life. I have communities in the plural, and yet through TikTok, I found my people. I received tips and validation for the ways I’ve coped with my brain all these years. #ADHDTok became one of my homes.

This platform was big enough for all of me. I found immense joy in entertaining content, especially from rappers. One hilarious creator looked like your average “Nice White Parent” you might encounter at a Park Slope playground, yet she made videos from her walk-in closet about her two small children—all set to incredible hip-hop beats. I loved the analysis of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef. The number of reaction and lyric-analysis videos I consumed was staggering, but every one of them made me smarter. This wasn’t mindless scrolling of cat videos (though there’s nothing wrong with that if it’s your thing). I was doing research—exploring topics I’m passionate about and supporting creators who deserved it. When I first saw Jools LeBron, I couldn’t have imagined the fame she was about to achieve; I just liked her flippant comedy and makeup.

TikTok connected me to my queer community. For the first time in my 53-year-old femme life, I saw content by people I found attractive. So many thirst traps by masculine women crossed my feed. I’d send them to my friend, though even those didn’t convince her to join the app. Still, TikTok gave me everything.

I even got my five minutes of virality when two of my videos hit over 2 million views each. Both times, I used the experience in my classroom to teach my students, reminding me that they were my initial draw to the app. My students, Generation Z, began using TikTok as much for a search engine as for entertainment. They were the driving force behind the platform, and I was grateful for all the ways they influenced me.

But I also loved how Vice President Harris used TikTok to campaign last year, how AOC used it to connect with the public and rally support, and how creators used it to educate about history, economics, and politics. I saw class consciousness rising there.

I never gained more than about 4,000 followers, but that’s a lot. It wasn’t enough to monetize my content, and I stopped creating when my boss found my account and criticized one of my videos so harshly that I took it down. Over the last year or so, I’ve only shared snippets of happiness on the app. Life felt overwhelming in the best way as I’d taken radical steps to change my life, and they paid off. TikTok became less of a dream space for me when I was seen there by people in my life who were critical. Before that, the few who criticized were easy to dismiss. You could usually go to their profiles and see they weren't making content themselves and were not showing their faces. The real people of TikTok were supportive of each other. We who revealed our true faces and found one another under shared hashtags like #witchtok, #ADHD, or #GenX were almost always kind and supportive in the comments.

I spent most of Saturday on the app, scrolling old videos and new ones, checking in on my favorite creators and watching goodbye after goodbye. When the message popped up telling me it was banned, I was sad. But when I saw the message that Trump was going to bring it back, I knew it was gone forever. Because I won’t be back. Not only did my boss find me there and chastise my content, but now the evil overlord thinks he can take credit for it when he was the one who took it from us in the first place. I saw the Meta connection they wanted me to make the other day. I see who is celebrating his win. A place that felt revolutionary is gone now, but hopefully, the consciousness it sparked is not. I know now that the revolution will not be on TikTok any more than it will be on television, but perhaps the spark of it began there. Perhaps all those TikTokers fleeing to Red Note and now to Substack are indicative of that resistance. The Trump messages when it went down and came back online hours later felt like something out of a dystopian novel, putting into high relief the ways in which things have irrevocably changed in our country. TikTok, in the way we loved it, may be gone, but the connections it fostered—the sparks of creativity, class consciousness, and radical solidarity—remain. Perhaps the revolution was never meant to live on a platform but in the connections we take forward from it.