I associate yikyak with autumn, autumn with possibility, to admit truths to yourself you would not otherwise.

I was in college when yikyak was alive the first time. I was feeling alone in a new place, unsure of who I was, tired of my facebook self, and enjoying the company of disembodied sans serif voices, also not knowing. On cold days, it warmed me to know that people within a few mile radius of me were also alive and uncertain and stupid as shit.

because of yikyaks proximity feature, the anonymous postings had in them a yearning that was absent in other online anonymous spaces, like you really were telling someone nearby a secret, like you might even meet them.

I graduated, forgot about yikyak. sometime between 2018 and 2020, I think I was dying inside. I finally visited 4chan and understood that avenues for online anonymity had always existed, but the energy there was sad, and everyone was the same voice, an unpleasant one. On yikyak, everyone was their own distinct sort of lonely lovesick horny dumbass.

in heaven, all names will dissolve, all shall be revealed, and we will, incredibly, love each other more for it. In this sense, yikyak is the closest an app has come to simulating heaven.

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so when yikyak revived itself in 2021, right when the city had also started to come back alive, it felt like I was at school again. Like some pavlovian bell, I believed: if autumn has yikyak, it must also mean that life has this exciting potential. I could become anyone. I am not alone.

Yik yak is seasonal. I download it in the fall and delete it before spring. But last fall, when I went to download it, I discovered YikYak had died a second death, sold off to some other company, school email login required. the cops had arrived. go home.

Then came the dead children, and my parents watching late night tv don’t see any of it, and still don't. So my dad asks, why are you so depressed, and I cant tell him, because he'd get irritated if I said, “all the dead children,” because he hasn't seen them, and without using these words, he tells me, “stop looking at the dead children, it’s out of your hands, and plus, they dont matter,” and I tried to stop looking but I just felt worse.

some of you reading this are cringing hard right now. oh you’re making this all about yourself. but that’s the whole anonymity thing, you can’t call me a virtue signaler out here. Im questioning what my life has meant, and how to continue.

A family messaged me to post their gofundme and I hesitated because I thought, people will think I’m cringe if I share this. even writing that out makes me want to kill myself. people my age who actually have done something useful with themselves all dying gruesome deaths, they were on the same screen as my friends. I follow a journalist my same age and then one day his head is gone. He lived and died for something. If heaven exists he is there. What am I doing? posting on web-client yikyak.

I stopped seeing a therapist in 2022 when the insurance crapped out. that was around the last time I had the app.

you can’t tell a therapist you think about killing yourself because they report you to the cops! maybe they won’t but they might, right? and doesnt that defeat the purpose? I will never do it, I won’t ever do it! but it's the thought, it keeps happening, and it keeps getting worse, and I can't talk about it, because then who can you tell?

on yikyak, you couldnt say that either.

https://gofund.me/501554f5