The following narrative paragraph is an exploration of the photograph “Comments” by Steve Cutts. It touches on the emotional distress of negative comments online and in person. The paragraph I have written follows a teenage boy who posts a hateful comment online and sees the repercussions.

What Have I Done?

What have I done? I grip my phone with shaking fingers as I read the hateful words of confused people. People I gathered. It wasn’t meant to be serious, nonetheless it all happened that day after school.

September twentieth exactly one week ago I slammed the door to my bedroom with a bang. She had just told me off for skipping school the day of a test. I did not care; I still don’t. I sank into the covers of my bed without a thought in mind except injustice. I hate it when she tells me off, she never has the right. However, because of this anger I made that awful choice.

I pulled out my phone and went on Instagram so I could decompress. As I was scrolling through the abundance of posts, I stumbled upon one that shocked me. I saw a boy who looked to be my age but to my surprise he was wearing a cropped t shirt. I thought while looking at his post how weird he was for wearing girl clothes. I didn’t understand why he would wear something so out of the ordinary. His post had only fifty likes and not a single comment. I thought I should help him out.

I snorted when I typed the words that changed his life. I smirked as I pressed the arrow that published my comment. “That shirt makes you look stupid”. The comment was silly, but it had made me feel powerful, so I wrote another. I wrote sharper words the second time around, however to me it was all jokes.

I ended up in a posting frenzy until the boy’s comments went from zero to twenty-seven. Twenty-five out of the twenty-seven were mine. I didn’t think much about the other two. My original comment looked juvenile compared to the final one.

I went to bed clueless of my actions and the effect they can have on someone. Today however when I saw my friend sent me a text message, I opened it and to my horror it was a meme of the Instagram boy, with the tagline “Me when my mom makes me try on hand me downs two times to small”.

My first thought was how is that guy a meme he’s a nobody. So, I clicked on the original post to find out it had thousands of hate comments laughing at the guy’s outfit. Furthermore, my comment had thousands of likes and people replying agreeing with me. I had completely forgotten about this.

The boy had a new video addressing the comments and he was speaking up about mine. He had red eyes and talked about how long it took him to have the confidence to post in his favorite t shirt. I feel Horrible.

What have I done? How did just a few comments spiral into this? I used to find it funny, now I realize it’s not funny. I got lost in the feeling and changed someone’s life. He is forever a meme, and I will forever be safe hidden behind a screen when I don’t deserve to be.