The Joke That Said What I Couldn't

How good will it be if other social media can be like WhatsApp and accommodate all these memes too? And that reminds me of this particular phase in my life when I was not feeling very okay. Not something dramatic, actually. But that is that of me not feeling okay that I can not even figure or try to wrap my head around to explain it to those who actually cared and asked me. I feel so heavy that I showed in my actions for weeks, and I did not even have any iota of language to describe it.

Due to the fact that I was unable to express myself, I usually send memes. I have different types on my phone. Each meme is for a perfect response. There was this time I sent a meme of a cartoon character just sitting and staring blankly at a wall with a caption that said Just living with really living. He laughed at it, and we never talked about it again. But I knew he perfectly got what I was trying to say even without making a perfect conversation that could have taken some minutes to perfectly explain and reach a conclusion; that is, if we even reach any.

And this thought has crossed my mind several times, and even yesterday, I still saw the traits while talking to someone. This country has raised us in a way that while struggling, we never said it out in plain language. And this is something that we have been taught since childhood: to carry things quietly and report the outcome. Well, maybe because I am a man. We never tend to show our emotions because we call it our private matter. And when we show how vulnerable we are in the open, some see it as our weakness, and over here, weakness attracts the wrong kind of unnecessary attention. And that is why most people resort to alternative routes. I have been there too, and maybe I am still there.

And this is why memes have become one of them for those who know how to use them, because some will say it's childish. Funny. A perfectly timed GIF can pass the message across in grief, irony, exhaustion, frustration, and affection without having to type anything further after I send it to the other person. The humor from it always gives this enough distance to make the honesty bearable. I can tutor something true about another person's life, and if it lands on the wrong side, I can easily retreat behind it with a funny thing I saw online.

A lot of people don't understand memes; maybe this is one of the reasons why they always underestimate them when they see one. Though some see it as a way of entertainment too, which is absolutely correct. But how I see it is like an emotional shorthand, which is what matters to me. And that is why a meme hands those people who say feelings need to be earned before they can be expressed an acceptable container for what they can or cannot simply express plainly.

And if we don't have memes around, maybe our world would just be a place where all those feelings found no sideway to exit. They will just be somewhere less visible. And the cartoon characters that was sitting and looking at the blank wall. I and my friend didn't have to say anything because her perfectly understood the message I passed across.

Thank you for reading.

_{Images created by Gemini AI}