MidReal Story
Edge of Fame: TikTok's Last Leap
Scenario: Jake: If TikTok is Banned, I Will free fall off cliff
Create my version of this story
“Get the fuck up!”
I jolted awake just as my phone was ringing.
The screen was lighting up with a cascade of notifications and missed calls.
“TikTok’s getting banned worldwide!”
I read the first message on my screen, and I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
It had to be a joke, right?
TikTok, the app that had made me famous and turned me into a social media influencer, was getting banned?
There was no way it could be true.
I read through more of my messages, and my heart plummeted.
People were freaking out, crying, and begging for it not to be true.
I quickly got out of bed and turned the TV on to see if I could find any news coverage on it.
But there was nothing.
I sat down on my bed and stared blankly at my phone for a few minutes.
The notifications were still going off like crazy, but I couldn’t bring myself to read any more of them.
It felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room, and I just sat there in stunned silence.
TikTok being banned worldwide.
It didn’t even seem real.
And as I sat there thinking about it, the tears started to well up in my eyes.
It’s just an app, Jake, I told myself as I wiped away my tears.
But it was so much more than that.
I’d spent the last three years crafting my identity around TikTok.
It was where I’d built up my following, where I’d made friends with people from all over the world, and where I’d found a sense of community that I’d never had before in my small town.
Before TikTok took off, I was just another small-town nobody who no one would ever know or care about.
But now, I had millions of followers who watched every video I posted and hung on my every word.
I could make or break trends with a single post, and brands were willing to pay me thousands of dollars to promote their products to my audience.
My whole life was wrapped up in TikTok, and the idea of losing it all was too much to bear.
I closed out of my notifications and opened the app instead.
If it was really going away, then I wanted to spend as much time on it as I could before it was gone forever.
When the app loaded, I saw that all of the trending videos were about the ban.
I called free falling Group
I swiped through a few of them, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch any of them.
I scrolled down to my messages instead and saw that I had hundreds of new ones that had come in over the last few minutes.
Each one that I read felt like a stab to my heart, but I couldn’t stop myself from reading more of them.
There were too many for me to go through at once, so I started at the top of my inbox and worked my way down.
The first message was from a fan who had been following me for years and had sent me a message every day since they’d discovered my account.
The next one was from a girl who had told me that she’d started learning English because of me, and now she could speak it fluently.
Then there was a guy who had told me that he’d been going through a really difficult time in his life and that my videos were the only thing that could make him smile.
I closed out of my messages as soon as I finished reading that last one and stared at my phone in silence.
I didn’t want to read any more messages like that because they only made me feel worse.
Because TikTok wasn’t just an app for me; it was my whole life.
It was where I found my voice, where I could be my true self without fear of judgment or rejection, and where I could be part of a community that accepted me for who I really was.
And now it was going away forever.I didn’t know what to do next as I sat there staring at my phone.
Should I start posting my content on another platform?
Should I try to get a job somewhere else?
What would happen to all of my friends and followers if we lost touch?
My mind was flooded with questions that I didn’t have the answers to, and I felt like I was drowning in them as they swirled around in my head.
In a desperate attempt to make sense of it all, I called my best friend Sarah.
She had been busy studying for the bar exam, so we hadn’t talked in a few days, but I needed to hear her voice more than anything right then.
I needed to tell her what happened and get some advice from her about what to do next.
She was one of the smartest people I knew, and she always had a way of making everything seem better, no matter how bad things got, so I knew that she’d be able to help me figure out what to do next.
When she answered, her voice sounded groggy, like she’d just woken up, and I quickly explained that it was an emergency and that I needed to talk to her right away.
“Is everything okay?”
she asked, sounding more awake now that she could tell how serious I was being.
“TikTok is getting banned worldwide,” I said, my voice cracking as soon as the words left my mouth.
“Oh, my God,” she said, her voice full of surprise and concern.
“Are you okay?”
"I'm going Free falling"
“No,” I said.
“I’m not okay at all.”
There was a long pause before she finally spoke again.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” she said.
“I know you loved that app so much, Jake.”
“Yeah,” I said with a heavy sigh.
“It was my whole life…”
I sounded so dramatic, even to myself, but it was the truth.
And the fact that everything was going to be changing so soon was hard for me to handle.
I felt like my whole world was falling apart around me, and there was nothing that I could do to stop it.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“I wish I could be there with you right now.”
“I know you do,” I said with a sad smile.
“But you’re all the way in New York.”
She’d moved there at the beginning of the year when she got a new job working as a lawyer at a fancy law firm, and it was going to be a long time before she’d be able to come back home to visit again.
I missed her so much already, but it made me feel a little bit better just knowing that she was there for me over the phone.
“We’ll have to meet up later,” Sarah said.
“Yeah,” I said with a smile.
“We can go to the beach together like usual, and I can show you all of my new TikTok dances!”
It made me feel a little bit better just thinking about it, but then I remembered that none of that would even matter because TikTok would already be gone by then.
“Or not,” I said with a heavy sigh.
“Sorry, I’m just really upset right now…”
“I know you are,” she said, sounding just as sad as I was.
“But at least we still have today, right?”
That was true, but it wasn’t going to make much of a difference to me because I’d be spending all of it making new content for my followers who were expecting me to post something new later today.
There were twenty-five million of them in total, and they were all counting on me to keep making them smile and laugh every single day.
“I have to go,” I said after checking the time on my phone and seeing how late it was getting.
“I have some stuff that I need to take care of before my followers start sending me messages asking where I am and what I’ve been doing all day.”
“I’m sure they’d understand if you took one day off, Jake,” she said.
“No, they won’t,” I said with a frown before finally hanging up the phone and tossing it aside with a heavy sigh.
I knew that Sarah was right and that my followers would understand if I had to take a day off because of everything that was happening with TikTok, but I also knew that they’d be really disappointed if they didn’t get to see anything new from me today.
And since nobody knew when the ban would officially go into effect or what would happen after it did, I couldn’t afford to waste any time before posting what might end up being my last video ever on the app.
