Week #2: 

“The rest of the world was black and white, but we were in screaming color”

Welcome to “Jess It Up”! My name is Jessica Fellerman, but my friends call me Jess. I am 19-years-old and I grew up in Kingston, Pennsylvania. I am in my second year at LCCC, but I am transferring to Wilkes Univerity in the Fall to major in Communications. Fortunately, I have had a pretty good life. Growing up, my parents made sure I had a fair opportunity to try out anything I wanted. I tried so many sports, but I never felt passionate about any of them. Friends around me would be absolutely enthralled and immersed in joy when playing these sports and it felt like I was trekking along miserably on the bylines. It certainly took me quite some time to figure out who I am. 

I think it’s completely outlandish to expect seniors in high school to make a decision that will likely impact the directory of the rest of their life. I graduated high school at 17 and I knew not a thing about myself. In retrospect, I spent those four years of high school and, prior to that, three years of middle school trying to fit in. Being different from the rest was an absolute nightmare. In my head, I had integrated and lived by a herd mentality. Standing out was not on the table for me, I did not want to be a spectacle of any kind.

At the beginning of my senior year, I downloaded the social media app, TikTok. I downloaded it as a spectator, and never did I imagine I would meet the other side of that consumer-producer relationship. One day, however, I started posting videos not thinking too deeply about them. I just recorded what made me happy and uploaded the content to what was at the time, a few friends who followed me. Eventually, I started posting pretty consistently and one day I went viral. I uploaded a silly little video, went to bed, and the next day woke up to 50,000 followers and 1 million likes. Little did I know my life would never be the same after that.

I wanted to maintain my following, so I started posting consistently thereafter. I read up on my analytics and learned everything about my target demographic. My entire life was overtaken by social media. I was trying to gain and maintain a following on every platform. I got lucky, I made a lot of online friends (that I still adore and talk to every day, even two years later) and connections. I was over the moon. I felt a sense of pride I had not ever imagined existed. For the first time, I understood what it was my friends were feeling when they immersed everything into the sports they loved. Unfortunately, with my newfound success came opinions I never asked for. I quickly learned about the dark side of social media and that not everyone was going to like me. This was troublesome because my entire internal monologue was always built on a need to be perceived as “good.” I’m okay with it now, but it was hard to process at first. The worst of it came right around the time the pandemic did. Things went downhill pretty fast and I took a step back from social media. I went ghost.

From the Spring and through Summer I felt myself rotting away. Rising from bed became an accomplishment, even if it happened at 7 pm. One night, it all became intolerable. I could not turn it off anymore, I did that for too long. The anxiety and depression I had manifested spilled out of me as if I were floodgates waiting to be cracked. Speaking was not an option, coherent sentences were too far gone. I did not know what to do, so I grabbed a pen and an old notebook that never seemed to find its way out of my room post-graduation. I just started writing. I do not think I even realized what I was writing though. I just needed to feel like I was letting something, anything at all, out. 

After what felt like hours of ink stains and a cramping hand, I looked down at what I had just written, a series of metaphors and sad prose. The smudged work before me was the first thing I felt proud of in months. Suddenly, I felt pieces of myself gravitating back toward me. Could this crumpled-up piece of paper really be my missing piece, I pondered? From then on, whenever I felt those terrible emotions rising to the surface, I wrote. It did not matter what. I realized then that writing was my purpose. It had been all along. Concealed through three identities: an old notebook, anxiety attacks, and depressive episodes, it lay waiting to be discovered. I told those close to me that I found it, my purpose. I would be a writer. I would write books, poems, songs, articles, anything at all. My hometown skeptics called it delusion, they said I had no grasp on reality. I knew I was right about my purpose when those statements did not bother me.

So after constructing an entire brand on TikTok around comedy, I had to rebrand. I started posting music-related content. I more than doubled my following just by posting what I am truly passionate about
and I now have 143,000 followers. I am a writer but learned quickly that my specialty is songwriting. My biggest inspiration is Taylor Swift, which leads to the title of this post. “The rest of the world was black and white, but we were in screaming color” is a lyric from her song Out Of The Woods. Since coming to terms with the most real version of myself I have ever known, that line began to resonate with me more than ever before. I am finally okay with nonconformity. I believe my writing illustrates the truest colors of my character. Through writing, I learned that I am passionate, dedicated, and attentive. I’ve used my ability of clear articulation to strengthen myself professionally and creatively. I learned how to be more empathetic and perceptive. My moral code has been strengthened. I intentionally themed my blog black and white, because I want my writing to be the focus point. No amount of graphic design could paint me in the same light that my words can.

I look back on the girl I was two years ago and my heart breaks for her. She was wandering lost without a clue, living for the approval of others. However, without my past, I could have never reached this destination. Because of my past, I have been strengthened, humbled, and greeted by newfound self-awareness. So cruelly and mystically constructed, my future awaits. In the death of my past, I feel truly alive.

Swift, Taylor. “Out Of The Woods.” 1989, Deluxe Edition., Apollo A-1 LLC, 2014, Track 4. Spotify, open.spotify.com/track/6Nde5KuTXyB7jlPO4upaBo?si=_DiK8i22SAKTClAl2zM6GA.