Mentally I'm Here

Submission 18,799

About

Mentally I'm Here, sometimes written as Mentally I Am Here, is a phrase used on Twitter paired with an image to represent a person's mental state. Although the phrase and image pairing has been used to compare a person's physical location to mental state on Twitter since 2008, the practice became popular in July 2020 and was attributed to feelings of escape or anguish during the coronavirus pandemic.

Origin

On April 22nd, 2008, Twitter user @AndyBeal^[4] posted the earliest known usage of the phrase on Twitter and pairing it with a link that has since been deactivated (shown below, left). On August 20th, 2015, Twitter user @BraniffMoot^[5] uploaded an image of an ocean in the earliest image tweet that used the phrase (shown below, right).

Spread

On June 15th, 2020, Twitter user @PPRADAFEMME^[6] uploaded a popular tweet captioned, "mentally I'm here wearing a flowy dress" paired with a garden image (shown below, left). The tweet gained over 62,200 likes and 24,300 retweets in two months. On June 27th, Twitter user @milkygoddess^[7] uploaded an example that launched the popularity of the meme on Twitter (shown below, right). The tweet accumulated over 155,600 likes and 47,500 retweets in two months.

On August 12th, Twitter user @paperssil^[8] tweeted, "mentally i am here" with an image from the horror film Midsommar and acquired over 21,100 likes in two weeks (shown below, left). On August 21st, Twitter user @helen^[9] tweeted a cursed image example that accumulated over 20,700 likes in three days (shown below, right). Junkee,^[1] Mashable^[2] and Complex^[3] published articles on the trend in late August.