welcome to my notes app

Somewhere between the fifth stitch and the tenth take about a stranger’s face was when Tiktok finally lost me. Takes, ”a user’s opinion, response, or creative interpretation of a trending sound, video, or trend on the platform”, were flooding my For You page about “Wedding MakeupGate”  and one too many opinion videos on the topic finally pushed me into IcantmfTAKEitanymore territory.

For those unaware, WeddingMakeupGate, despite the vocabulary implication of presidentially large stakes, actually refers to one of the least scandalous and painfully relatable events of all time: paying for a service that you ended up fucking hating. MakeupGate, as the title suggests, refers to this scenario played out on a wedding day—bride gets makeup done, bride hates makeup (fair, it was cakey IMHO), bride makes TikTok wiping it off and talking about how ugly it is. Enter: the internet promptly suited up for battle.

• Should the makeup artist have asked and offered to re-do it????
• Was the bride’s video just another example of people-pleasing’s sinister undertone?????
• And most importantly, was the makeup even ugly in the first place??

And as much as I normally would want to get in on the social media scrap and raise my flag of discourse allegiance (Team Makeup Artist—don’t rob someone of the chance to fix something just because you want content about how much you hated it), that day I just snapped. Suddenly all I could think about was just how utterly non-juicy and pedestrian gossip and drama now had to be to warrant a chorus of yays and nays from thousands of selfie cams around the world.

I found myself asking as I often do: why do we even care about this? Like, TRULY. Why?

I set my phone down and genuinely told myself to go touch grass. Because since when did cowboy caviar, a coloring book, or simply not enjoying a restaurant become the stuff of a Greek chorus?

What really put me off the app for good(ish) wasn’t the excess. It was the misshapen equity. Every situation, no matter how minor, was being escalated with the same intensity and fervor.

Over the months leading up to this departure,  it felt more and more like I was swimming in an ecosystem designed to rev people up to the same piercing emotional pitch no matter what the content was. Not the important stuff. Not the literally presidentially large stuff. Just… whatever was available that day.

It used to take at least a cheating scandal. A group chat leaked to a journalist. A wardrobe malfunction. But now? A mild inconvenience and a ring light is all it “takes” to be the producers of our own dramas and the raging audience “pick a side” culture to match.

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Take Culture Is Reality TV If It Was Actually Real

Shows like Survivor are pros at designing an experience so betrayal and alliances on a remote island can still strike a chord with anyone who’s had a friend turn on them or been humiliated whilst doing physical activity. But TikTok distributes an endless-scroll feed of should-be-but-aren’t boring micro-conflicts we can project onto. Like anxiety winning the war against telling your hairstylist they fucked your shit up, or that guy who ghosted you still liking your instagram story (WHY DO THEY DO THIS).

And TBH? I guess this is what reality TV would be if it were actually real. People love to complain that reality TV is fake, overproduced, and unrealistic (I’d counter with the liberatory spirit of “yes, and?”)—the fights are too extra, the friend groups are too fake. But TikTok said, “ok cool then what if everyone starred in their own low-stakes, emotionally overcharged, low-budget personal main character docuseries and the drama was just existing as a human?

And what’s wild is that it works.

Take culture has shown me, shockingly, that people are extremely emotionally invested in the mundane. And not in spite of its unremarkable everyday ordinariness but because of it. In the year 2025, salaciousness no longer has to live in the extremes to draw a fuck or 20 out of an audience. In fact, it’s in the deeply familiar that the most juiciness is squeezed. 

And what’s doubly fascinating is that the passion and rage and audience loyalty behind it isn’t any lower than what you’d find from viewers arguing in r/bravorealhousewives. People will RIDE AT DAWN for the someone’s Uber driver whose car smelled weird or against the Southwest gate agent who made them check a bag they swear fit just fine in the overhead. We stitch it, narrate it, diagnose it and make the everyday interpersonal events of someone’s unremarkable life relatable, creatable, and consumable. 

Now there is a rabid fandom for everyday life.

So at a certain point I had to ask myself: if the stories aren’t Jersey Shore extreme, and the characters aren’t celebrities, and the stakes are objectively low… then TRULY why do we care this much?

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Takes Are Just Trauma Responses with Ring Lights

I knew I needed to take a screen break when I found myself ready to throw virtual hands for this makeup artist in the name of Restorative Communication. As someone who takes people at face value and prides myself on being receptive to requests for changed behavior when given the CHANCE AND INFORMATION TO DO SO (sry i’m activated again), my wounds of being punished for something I didn’t even know I did were gnawing at the bars of my emotional enclosure. 

Our strongest takes about the smallest things are often just raw emotional wounds looking for a ride. 

The take is just the container of an emotional backlog that’s desperate to catch up and have its day in the sun. It carries all the receipts of emotional leakage happening under the guise of “having an opinion.” The take isn’t wrong but it is often inflated by layers of personal memory disguised as commentary. 

By the time a take reaches the internet, it’s carrying ten other moments it never admitted were still sore. It’s the emotional residue we never journaled about, never talked to a friend about, never even admitted we were still sore from. And, then presto:  finally the stage appears and you are heard. 

As a mental health academic, catharsis enthusiast, and water sign, I can see the value of letting that shit out and sharing one’s voice.  But ~I couldn’t help but wonder~:is the exercise of “take-ing” actually moving us through a process of healing or getting us stuck in a combative opinion chamber of more harm? Is it just a more eloquent version of yelling into the void?

What gets missed is the awareness of what’s been prodded at or tenderized in the first place.

 The pause between receive and response is pre-natal. No “wait—why did this hit me so hard and why do I give a fuck?” No sitting with the sting before sounding off. Instead of journaling. Instead of texting a friend that that thing from 5 years ago got brought up again and has you feeling some typa of way. 

When a moment hits you hard enough to make you pause, or post, or go on a 3-minute rant—it’s not random. Something in you recognized it. And the question isn’t “what’s your take,” it’s “what’s the memory and what needs tending to?” Instead of tracing the outline of the emotional bruise to figure out where it came from, we just react, film, and externalize; we upload an emotional charge straight into the For You page and name it ~objective commentary~ in the name of what’s right.

Instant transmission: wound to opinion piece, pain to post.

But if that’s why we GET activated, why do we stay activated and deep in the TikTok take collective?

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The Customer Base for Take Culture Is Actually Your Inner Child

Take culture isn’t just where pain gets exposed and debated – it’s also where pain gets soothed. Take culture’s most loyal employee is actually our inner child. Once strangers start validating a take that once made us feel crazy or alone, it creates a kind of emotional relief we didn’t even know we were chasing. And it’s not just sharing to a friend and or talking to a 10-person group to AA. The sheer numbers and volume of comments on our side of the story allow emotional mass of our personal stories to finally get mirrored back to us in a way that feels proportionate.

Every day I thank *gestures vaguely* for the fact that my career is not dependent on my willingness to have thousands of strangers weigh in on my life. That being said, there are injustices in my life that I do believe deserve the anger or indignance of a mid-size following. A lot of the least scandalous stuff that shaped us (ruined us) the most—the group hang invitations that never came, the friendships where you’re always the one reaching out, the hairstylist that fucked your shit up—didn’t come with a single impassioned megathread or comment section rallying cry.

And then someone drops a video with exactly that thing. FINALLY thousands of people are weighing in on the right side of your history, breaking it down, defending it, validating it—and it hits. The experience is being reflected at the scale it actually felt. Like it was worth the pre-sleep thought spirals or the days hiding tears at work. The chorus of “that was messed up” that your inner child never got to witness on your behalf has arrived and you are HERE FOR IT.

Our pain largely exists and stays huge only for us. 

Quietly humongous. Secretly formative. At times permanently warping our sense of trust, or self-worth, or safety in the world—but they happened in the kind of everyday settings that the average person doesn’t get full-scale series made about.

As adults, we live with the awareness that the world can’t be up in arms in accordance with our grievances and our emotional state (booooooo). We know cognitively that the coworker who left you hanging with a deliverable on Friday afternoon doesn’t actually deserve to be berated by the TikTok grand jury via counterpoints, drags, and doxxing. But what we often feel emotionally is that not enough people cared. And that fucking hurt.

But with takes, finally, it feels like the way it hurt is the way it’s being treated.

And there’s something deeply validating about finally seeing a version of your own unacknowledged pain get the overwhelming reaction it always deserved. 

So I wonder—when we’re scrolling and stumble across a take war with one side that sounds just like that one thing that never got the time of day it deserved, if it’s a balm to unresolved pain.

And maybe that’s why take culture can feel so cyclical sometimes—because most of the time, we don’t want resolution. We just want witnesses.

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It was never about the makeup. 

Our nervous systems are remembering things we never got to name and then we end up making digital monuments to our pain instead of digesting it. But what we end up with is performance and picking sides, not processing 

When enough people are stuck in a loop of unvalidated harm, of shouting into the void just to feel like their pain matters, what gets lost is our capacity to build something beyond it. In takes culture, are different views in the conversation giving us new information to approach familiar situations differently? Or is this just two wounds in a boxing ring and nobody gets to heal.

What can come of soothing oneself in these circumstances and affirming:

• “I can name what this reminds me of without having to prove it to strangers.”
• “The story behind my reaction is worth knowing.”
• “Naming it to myself might be enough.”
  

Sometimes the most radical thing we can do is just not having a take.

Not every sharp feeling needs to become a sharp take. Sometimes it just needs a place to land, to be held by our own arms, and to be led back home to where it lives in who we are.