DOES VENTING ANONYMOUSLY ONLINE ACTUALLY MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER?
By Abigail Whittington
I sat on the floor of my dorm, watching the light from the window behind me travel around my room until it was gone. My boyfriend of two years sat beside me as he explained to me that he wanted a break. We had been building up resentment against each other for a long time. One person would become upset over something small, but wouldn’t tell the other person what it was so the other person was left guessing and we would go back and forth feeding off each other’s anger without ever talking about it. Finally, our routine of feeling avoidance grew old. We couldn’t even enjoy the happy moments anymore. His solution was to initiate a break. He said we needed time apart to figure out what we wanted to do about our relationship.
A break sounded like a ridiculous solution to our issues at the time. I told him, “If communication is our problem then we should communicate right now and get everything out on the table. Taking a break is just enforcing our habit of running away from our problems until they go away or we forget about them.”
But he wasn’t listening to me and he still wanted to go ahead with a two-week break. He didn’t tell me what he wanted from this break, but I assumed it was the same as what I wanted, time apart to pinpoint why we don’t communicate and figure out a way to fix it. Maybe that was his intention at first, but then it became a question of whether or not the effort was worth it for him. He walked out of my room that night completely composed while I remained crumpled there on my floor with tears streaming down my face and a pile of used tissues surrounding me.
As soon as he left, I hastily threw open my laptop that was sitting beside me and began composing a tweet that would express exactly how angry and hurt I was. If he wasn’t going to listen to me, someone on Twitter would. After rewriting my tweet several times I eventually just deleted it and closed my laptop. We still followed each other on Twitter so I didn’t want to tweet something that would make him angry and lead our two-week break to a permanent breakup. Facebook wasn’t sufficient either. If I vented my feelings to Facebook, my family would worry about my mental health and they would ask for details that I wasn’t ready to share. I even tried journaling, but it wasn’t giving me the cathartic feeling I was searching for. I was craving some sympathy, some confirmation that what I was feeling was valid and confirmation from others that a break is not the best way to deal with problems. I had nowhere to go. I wanted to be heard. I needed somewhere I could post publicly, somewhere where it was okay to abandon the polished, cheerful life that I portrayed on all other social media sites, somewhere where I could vent without it tracing back to me, somewhere where I was at least somewhat understood
I thought to myself, there has to be something out there that would provide exactly what I was looking for. So I began my search in the Apple App Store by searching the one word that described exactly what I wanted to do, vent. To my relief there was an app called Vent that claims to be a place where you can “express you feelings and connect with people who care.” I downloaded it immediately, but it took me a while to actually feel comfortable posting on the app and I was doubtful that it would make me feel any better.
I was worried about how anonymous the app could be. I had never heard of it before, but maybe other people I knew did know about and used it regularly and stumbled upon my profile and pieced my vents together to reveal who I was. It wouldn’t be hard. I made my username my first and middle name out of frustration that everything else I tried was already taken. I was also skeptical about whether or not this would be beneficial at all. I thought it was a hate spewing app that people only went on when they were angry or sad so how could anything good come from it? But after about a week of observing other venters online I finally made my first post:
I felt a small cathartic release even if it was online and not to his face. It felt good to talk about him in a negative way. Since we had the same friends, I didn’t want to influence them on the way they perceive him. This was my alternative. I didn’t expect anyone to react to my post and I certainly did not expect a reply. Initially, I had a heartwarming feeling from that reply. Here was a total stranger who seemed to care enough to take a few seconds to leave a reply rather than just hit one of the buttons provided by the app to show sympathy and support. However, that heartwarming feeling disappeared quickly because after all, this person was a stranger to me.
The heartwarming feeling didn’t compare to what I had experienced in the past from venting on Twitter about things going wrong in my life. When Twitter was still fairly new and not everyone had an account, it was more acceptable for people to vent online. This was before Twitter made the shift to the polished versions of everyone. This was when Twitter was still honest and raw. Friends would reach out after a post like that and their words would have meaning because they actually knew you and cared about your wellbeing. Facebook was the same way in the beginning. Now it seems that online honest and heartwarming connection is lost.
Despite not receiving the full feeling of catharsis that I was looking for during my first post, I kept posting. The next post I made was after we decided to break it off for good. For context, he cracked my phone screen before our break even started. At the time I didn’t address how angry is made me that he carelessly dropped my phone and did not offer to pay to fix it, but with our distance from each other the anger I suppressed started to surface. I lost $115 fixing what he broke. In a way, I felt that my phone foreshadowed the breaking of my heart and shattering of our relationship and that is what I was trying to convey in this post.
This post received a little more love than the last one and the reply was a little sweeter too. I felt slightly more comforted after receiving attention on this post, but like the last post, the feeling was fleeting.
I wondered if I was just the exception so I went on Vent and asked users if they thought that posting on the app helped them feel better. Most people said they did. MyOwnFriend replied, “When I get a simple comment or even a “hug” (button), it makes all the difference to me, when I have vented something. It changes my mood. Makes me feel appreciated and I do appreciate them reading and the time they took to interact.”
I also asked MyOwnFriend why he or she used the app. They replied, “Many of us are in situations where we feel lonely. We have so much to say, whether good or bad, but have no one to tell it too.” Perhaps the app is really only useful to users who feel that they have nowhere else to go.
I posted again a few days later after learning from a friend that one of her friends saw him on Tinder and matched with him. I was heartbroken that he could move on less than a week after we broke up while I was still processing it and trying to pick myself up again.
This post didn’t receive any love from other venters, but I didn’t feel any different from the other times when my posts did receive some love. It proved to me that I didn’t much care if people hit the reaction buttons at the bottom of the posts or left a nice reply. The real value in the app for me was just putting my negative thoughts out there, feeling like I was being heard, even if I wasn’t really.
I came across a study by Brad Bushman that in which he had one group of people punch a sand bag while thinking of a person that angered them to release their frustrations and another group just sat still for two minutes. Bushman then allowed the two groups to press a button that sounded like a horn to images of these people after their form of venting and those who punched the sand bag pressed the button for a longer period of time than those who sat still for two minutes. Thus he found that doing nothing is more effective in reducing anger than acting on the anger in search of catharsis.
Perhaps that explained why the app wasn’t cutting it for me. I didn’t need to vent online and be heard. What I really needed was time to process in my head and understand and accept why we weren’t together. I needed introspection.
* * *
In the end though, I did vent one last time and this time was the most beneficial of my venting experience. I finally felt comfortable with calling my parents and telling them from beginning to end what happened since the break initiated and opening up about the way I felt toward the whole experience of the breakup. I spent a lot of time trying to hold back my anger toward the situation, but my parents comforted me by telling me that my anger was valid. I could show those feelings to people without fear of ridicule and I didn’t have to revert to an anonymous app to release those emotions. I was born with a support system and a venting dumping ground that I didn’t have to fear or hide my feelings from, my parents. Nothing can replace talking to the people who know you best and accept you even in your messiest times.