A photograph of nothing — the light caught in a glass of water on a windowsill, the sky gone bruise-purple over the rooftops — posted at an odd hour with a caption that started as one word and became a small poem. There is a particular texture to a Poet’s presence on social media: bursts of beauty where other people post a meal or a milestone. A feeling arrives in full saturation, the impulse to share it rises before judgement can weigh in, and out it goes into the feed — a piece of their inner weather, offered up raw, glowing, and faintly too much for the small grey box meant to hold it.
The post that overflows before judgement arrives
The Poet does not curate. When something moves them — a song, a grief, a sudden tenderness towards a stranger on a train — the wish to render it and send it is almost involuntary. They write the long heartfelt caption. They post the late-night thought in full colour. At their most luminous this is a gift: a feed that reads like a sensibility rather than a brochure, vivid and intimate and genuinely felt, capable of stopping a scrolling thumb with something true. To follow a Poet is to be let into an interior most people keep firmly shut.
But the same gate that opens so easily lets out things they later wish they had kept. The Poet is prone to the regretted post — the heart spilled across a public screen in the heat of an emotion that felt, at the time, as though it would never fade. The next morning brings the wince: the raw thing now visible to people who were never meant to see that far in, the sense of having been turned inside out before an audience that did not ask for it. Their gift for unguarded expression and their capacity for online over-exposure are the same trait, simply caught on different tides.
The slow tide that pulls them off the feed
The other half of the Poet’s online life is made of disappearance. When feeling floods past what they can hold, the Poet does not get louder; they go under. The vivid daily presence stops without warning. The account that glowed all last month sits untouched, not from coldness but because the Poet has retreated inward to where the high water is, and the bright clamour of the feed has gone faint and unreachable. They are not sulking. They are submerged, and posting again would mean surfacing, and surfacing is the very thing they cannot yet do.
This bewilders people who only knew the luminous version. A few quiet signs tell the flood-retreat apart from ordinary distraction:
- The vanishing is total rather than gradual — a feed that poured out colour goes dark all at once.
- They keep watching while unable to post, lurking in the warmth of others without managing to add their own.
- When they finally return, the first post often carries an apology or a confession, never a breezy pick-up where they left off.
To the Poet the silence is shelter, a tide they had no choice but to follow. To everyone watching the feed go still, shelter and withdrawal look exactly alike.
The bruise of every brighter life
There is a particular cruelty social media holds for the Poet, and it lives in their sensitivity. They feel the temperature of a feed with painful accuracy, and the feed is engineered to show them everyone else’s life at its most golden. A Poet scrolling through curated happiness does not simply note it and move on; they absorb it, colour it darker than it is, measure their own unedited interior against a procession of polished surfaces and find themselves wanting. The lighter image of someone else’s evening can ache in them for an hour. The comment they thought too cool, the post that received warmth theirs did not — these lodge and reverberate long after anyone else would have forgotten.
And because they feel comparison so keenly, they are tender about how their own offerings land. A post that goes unanswered can ring like a small rejection. A Poet will reread the silence around something they shared and paint it sadder with each pass, reading verdict into what was only the indifferent churn of an algorithm. The platform tugs hardest on precisely the nerve they cannot numb.
Why their feed runs in full colour
Everything strange and lovely about a Poet online — the floods and the long silences, the late-night confessions and the bruised comparisons — pours from a single spring: a heart that feels the whole world in vivid colour and cannot pretend otherwise, not even behind a screen. The work of a life, for this temperament, is not to post less or feel less, but to let the tides move without shame — to surface a little sooner from the dark stretches, to share the bright thing without the next-day regret, to remember that the polished feeds they envy are hiding precisely the depth they themselves give away. Met with a little self-mercy, a Poet need never flatten their inner weather into something that fits the small box. They go on posting in full colour, and the corner of the feed they touch stays warmer, stranger, and more alive than the rest of it.
