Social media plays an instrumental role in my life.

It became a necessity in early recovery from addiction when I had a strong need for connection with others but no confidence to socialise. For many years I had worked and performed across Scotland and my half bottle was never far from my lips. When that crutch was removed I lost the spring in my step.

2014 was not a great year to try and stay on the wagon. Having got a year of not drinking under my belt most of the people in my life assumed it was business as usual. The referendum campaign placed new demands on my time and headspace and I was successfully re-introducing myself as a sane, sober figure in an albeit obscure corner of Scottish culture.

But while I was trying to work my steps and stay on the straight and narrow I was unaware of another dangerous dependency that was developing. A dependency on the internet and, in particular, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

For about 10 years I had dominated the Scottish hip hop scene (harder than it sounds) with a string of influential releases. This was achieved without any real need for bizarre tools like social media, save for Myspace. But in my final few years of debauchery I well and truly "fell off", as we say in hip hop. To fall off means to render yourself irrelevant through either artistic inconsistency or by virtue of someone else's ascent. In my case both.

In the early days of sobriety social media allowed me to rebuild and expand my professional operation while exerting a modest but effective cultural force. Enough to create some opportunities that would help me lift myself out of poverty. Before long I was in college, thanks to sage advice of my long suffering partner, and studying journalism I learned even more about the wonders of social media.

I learned how it's eating the industry alive and jeopardising reporting as a central tenet of any healthy democracy. But I also learned how social media is taking power away from vested interests and potentially placing it in the hands of the tech-savvy citizen. The two-year course helped me develop my skills as a writer, giving me another string to my professional bow.

Soon I had a blog and was writing about Scottish independence. Some of the videos I published during that time got massive reactions from the public and suddenly, after many years of barking into a cultural vacuum using an obscure form of African-American art, it seemed people were becoming interested in what I had to say as well as the way I said it.

Yes voters were hyper-engaged and I would often come home to hundreds of notifications and interactions. It was as if everything I was saying was just so clever and perfect. All I had to do was hit a few specific notes and hundreds of people would boost my signal; giving me a wonderful sense of purpose and a fleeting sense of celebrity.

So many of us were in constant agreement with ourselves that being wrong was now optional.

But privately I was very confused. Alcohol and drugs had functioned as my self-esteem for so long that without them I was very vulnerable to losing perspective of myself and the world around me. The referendum reached fever pitch mid-2014 and while I was very active publicly, behind the scenes I was angry, agitated and obsessive. Without a genuine sense of self-worth to anchor me in life I became whatever the world decided I was on any given day. During this time I would oscillate wildly between an over-inflated sense of my own importance and a crushing sense of utter dejection.

In my public spats with National Collective I would create an armoury of multi-platform content to keep on file just in case I needed to respond to something quickly. Most of it was never published. I had identified that their use of social media was, perhaps, their greatest creative asset and so to challenge them you had to be digitally agile or they would literally just destroy you. My strategy was to make people wary of both avoiding and engaging me. In my mind I was in some kind of war; they were playing politics with art and I was their self-appointed agitator. Their cultural placenta.

To some that may seem worryingly misguided and to others terribly romantic. But in reality I was losing my grip on reality -- if I'd ever had it before. Regardless of the debate my emotional world was imploding and underpinning it all was a fear that without social media I would be confined to a hellish life of unrelenting obscurity and income insecurity.

Social media became a launch-pad from which to guide my polemical missiles directly to their targets. I was engaging debates in the hip hop scene as well as the cultural sphere. Not five minutes went by when I wasn't checking on the interactions -- naively engaging with people not realising the inherent limitation of debate on social media.

But I was also neglecting my duties at home as well as falling behind with college work. The strain took its toll as I grew more frustrated with what I was beginning to feel was a thematically centralised political campaign draped in a radical veil -- relying on "radicals" like me to play the unquestioning foot-soldier, hold our opinions until after the referendum and then be grateful for our colonisation.

Only a year prior I had been publicly provoking people for daring to even consider voting No and within 12 months, behind the scenes, I was seriously questioning whether I had been hoodwinked by Yes Scotland -- itself a social media powerhouse of slick counter-culture trickery.

I was beginning to think, in the privacy of my own troubled mind, that the promise of an independent Scotland was already ringing hollow. But speaking out seemed too frightening -- as well as professionally detrimental. Because of social media my whole process of decision-making was changing. I began to see myself as "followers" saw me and was increasingly making calculations about the risks of doing this or that. Not in real life but in cyber-space.

Half the country, unaware of the sheer power of this new morally ambivalent force, was swept away in a wave of misguided optimism that came to be known as the "echo-chamber". What we gained in a sense of monolithic moral fortitude, we lost in rationality.

Social media helped Yes close the gap on Better Together and created a wonderful sense of oneness about the Yes campaign; a grassroots carnival that woke the working class population out of its New Labour lullaby. We were finally ready to steer that ship home to her destiny in the harbour of statehood.

But much like me, the Yes movement over-estimated its own impact and bought into some of the moral simplicity it relied on to broaden its message. Like me, it was believing too much of its own bulls**t. Fuelled by social media Scotland, itself, became psychologically fragmented and emotionally unavailable.

On September 19 the new battle lines were drawn. The days that followed would become the germinal events that shaped post-referendum Scotland. Yes lost the battle but swiftly opened up multiple fronts in what is going to be a very long war.

And there is no theatre more unforgiving, no zone more senselessly ferocious than the ceaseless cauldron of social media.

By January 2015 I had relapsed, exhausted and disillusioned with the joyous awakening of the year prior. My obscene activity on social media throughout that brief period rightly earned me a few nights in the cells -- and a day in court.

Yet for many of us our livelihoods now hinge on this volatile medium. Many of us get paid to re-direct traffic, drive up hits and clock up views. For some of us there is no audience unless we are actively manufacturing conflict, confusion and misunderstanding.

And while social media delivered a wonderful moment of feeling that power was close to the hands of the Scottish people, we've since decided to give it all back to politicians without so much as a negotiation prior. In fact, many of us have decided to actually become politicians.

< p>Then for others -- myself included -- a distorted sense of self-worth is drawn from navigating this rhetorical nebula. We swear off it -- announcing our departures as we go -- only to return within days, even hours, dejected at an inability to regulate our own behaviour. Many of us are resigned to measuring our usefulness as people in the digital currency of retweets; increasingly deriving our sense of community (or foreboding) from the passive comments in an endless thread of witless conversation.

For every success social media brings some unforeseen mishap is sure to follow. For every friend request you receive an awkwardness will descend over a real conversation. For every cheque you cash there will be a hidden cost and for every ego-trip, a humbling, perhaps humiliating, reality check.

I sit here now truly puzzled as to how I am supposed to give my son the quality of life I never had without opening this infernal Pandora's Box. It's become my new dependency. It's become my new crutch.

For those born after its proliferation I imagine social media is to them what a telephone is to me. Just something you use. But for those of us caught in the cultural overlap, still trying to find out who we are in a time where the very concept of identity, both personal and national, is in constant flux, this punishing labyrinth can be a source of deep confusion -- and pain.

I'm going away for a while but if I only manage a few days I know you'll not be cruel. There's a little person in my house who looks a lot like me and though he doesn't s**t himself as much I used to, I'm pretty sure he's my son. There's also a beautiful, patient and forgiving woman attached to him.

Might go and see what they are up to.

Comment by Darren McGarvey. Darren is a writer and broadcaster and, under the name Loki, a rapper and hip hop artist. His music can be found here.