cool moment #582 on @perrimoran's page: roommates on a sand dune
Okay, so I'm not gonna lie... I really wish I had the life of Instagram user @perrimoran. She seems so happy. It seems like she loves school and like she has so much fun living in Savannah. She doesn't seem to have a hard time being away from home at all! She must be having such a great time at an art school; it must be so easy... she was just at the beach the other day! How does she have time for that?! She has amazing friends and she's so close with her family and she loves her job. She's also so passionate about her lifestyle. She always posts the coolest pictures of all the stuff she does. I seriously wish I had her life.
Well, here's the thing. I do have @perrimoran's life. I have all that happiness and fun. I'm so lucky to go to such a great school in such a beautiful part of the country. I seriously have the best friends and my family is more than I could ever ask for. I get so much fulfillment from my job and my babysitting jobs, I'm very passionate about animals and am lucky enough to spend a fair amount of time around them, and I do enjoy documenting and sharing all of these great moments, of which I have plenty. And on the other hand, I do not share the less great moments.
I don't post about the crippling anxiety that rolls around every so often or the occasional night that I cry myself to sleep. I don't show my followers the days that I lay in bed with an open textbook and blank notebook page staring at the ceiling because I can't get myself to focus on art history for more than four minutes at a time. I don't talk about how incredibly homesick I get or how much I miss my family and friends. I avoid showing the fact that I haven't made more than one new friend this year outside of my dorm. And I certainly don't talk about the fact that I hate all of this about myself.
Not a lot of other people talk about these unappealing things either. I'd like to change that.
Logically, I know that nobody has a perfect life. I think we all know this. We know that everyone struggles with something, or with multiple things. Yet somehow, we fall for the idea that the people on our Instagram feeds have better lives than we do because of the constructed image of what they want their lives to look like. I think that even if we know that our feed isn't always 100% accurate to reality, it can be damaging just to see all of the great things that other people are doing and we are not. It makes us compare ourselves to others. Others who have seemingly perfect lives. Others who make us feel subconsciously inadequate and bad about our own lives, no matter how lucky we are. To feel better, we post pictures of something fun we did to show off that our lives are exciting too. And without even realizing it, we could be making them feel the same exact way. It's a series of positive feedback loops. (And that is not necessarily a good thing.)
uninstagrammed moment #4801: this is how a day in my college life really looks.
Here's how that works. Using the example from before: I post a picture of myself at the beach on my day off. My follower sees that and envies how much fun I'm having, and begins to feel inadequate and unhappy with their banal routine. So they go back and find an image of a group of friends at a waterpark from a few weeks ago and post it to show the followers how much fun they're having. Then I see that waterpark post while I'm sitting on my bed scrolling mindlessly to avoid homework. I wish that I could be at a waterpark and have time to go do fun stuff with a group of friends like that. I compare and get down on myself, and in order to bring my own self-worth back up, I need some validation that my life is interesting and fun, so I find another picture of me looking really happy with a $10 smoothie bowl I got like two weeks ago and post that. The likes roll in from all of my followers. I feel good until I see their posts that one up mine. It goes on.
You can see how this consistent game of comparison quickly turns into a vicious cycle, right? It happens to so many people and most of us aren't even aware that we're playing this little game inside our minds. But you know what they say, admitting the problem is the first step towards recovery... I am totally guilty of feeling bad about myself and my life based on what other people post on social media. And that's kinda messed up. The good thing is, there are a few ways to change the way I see other people's posts, the way they make me feel, and the way that people see mine... here's what I'm gonna start doing.
yup. proud to say that a combination of really good skincare and prescription medication have made this *almost* go away
Recognize that everyone struggles.
Whether or not they're comfortable showing it, everybody, literally everybody, struggles with something. Whether it be their confidence, their happiness, their job, their schoolwork, their relationships... nobody has a perfect life all around. But of course, we want it to appear that way. A lot of people tend to be embarrassed by the struggles that they encounter on a day to day basis. When I say struggles, this could be anything from feeling super down for no reason to being mortified by the way we look. I, for one, only post pictures of myself in which my skin looks good. This tends to be a common one. A lot of people wear makeup, use Facetune, or throw up a peace sign to hide their acne in photographs that end up going online. I'm definitely guilty of all those things and let me tell you, that's just not how I look all the time. I've struggled with acne for so long and just now after MONTHS of red, inflamed, cystic, hormonal acne, it's just starting to clear up due to prescription medication. But scroll through my Instagram feed from the past few months and any picture of me will look like I have a naturally flawless complexion. I see the same thing on the pages of so many other girls and am consistently comparing myself to how they look. Even if they cake on concealer, overuse the blur feature to smooth their skin, or are covering half their face, I find myself feeling bad as I look at the picture. And logically I KNOW that everyone gets pimples, probably even these people. But I still feel bad about myself as I sit there and run my fingers over my bumpy skin.
We have to convince ourselves- we have to believe the fact that everyone does struggle with something. The things we see on Instagram are not carbon copies of our real lives. They are just windows that we peek through every once in a while to get a glimpse of what our friends and family are doing. Most of the time, the blinds on those windows are shut. That doesn't mean that life isn't continuing on the other side of that windowpane, it simply means it's too boring or private or uncomfortable to share. We only open the blinds when we have something we want others to make judgements about us based on.
Live for the pleasure, not for the picture.
Me and my dad on a walk in Seattle, 2016. This is one of my favorite pictures from that trip.
I can't tell you how much I have grown to hate the phase "let's take a picture for Insta". Now more than ever, people my age are obsessed with creating an image for themselves. Everything revolves around what people think of you, not what you think of you. I have literally heard the phrase "my goal tonight is to get a cute IG to post." I overheard this at my school on a weekend around the time that everyone started leaving the dorms to go to parties. (The reason I was out was to go get dinner... not a big partier myself) It made me so frustrated, so annoyed, but also kind of sad. Although I'm sure she wasn't completely serious, I didn't doubt that it sincerely was one of this girl's top priorities to take a picture that showed how much fun she was having with her friends or how glamorous her college social life was. I do recognize that I am making assumptions about this particular scenario. Maybe this girl had another specific and valid reason other than constructing an image of herself to be posting a party picture on Instagram. I can't say. But what I do know is that so many people take pictures purely for the response that they'll get on social media and that little jolt of dopamine they'll receive when the notification pops up: "@usernamehere liked your photo." Not to mention, posting that picture of your best times will make you life look more appealing, and by extension, it'll make YOU look more appealing. I mean, come on. Who wouldn't wanna be friends with someone who has such an interesting and fun life?
It's all good fun until we realize how much we're missing out on. We're sacrificing the real, physical experience for a staged version that we instead look at through a lens and projected onto a screen. I can't speak for everyone else, but I almost always have the most fun when my phone is in my pocket and not in my hand. I think that we should start living for the pleasure of the opportunity we have for a great time, and not living for the post about it. Of course, as I'm sure most of you know, I love photography and capturing moments, so I may seem to be contradicting myself here. Let me make it clear that I am not saying to stop taking photos. Photos are an incredibly meaningful way to document special experiences and one-time moments that we want to remember. By all means, take your pictures! I just hope that we can all get on the same page and agree that constructing the image with intent for it to look real doesn't make it real. Do you think kids would know to smile for pictures if adults didn't train them to? Document. Don't direct. And don't do it for the intent of showing off. Do it for the memory.
Lindsey and me laughing about our double chins. This is as real as it gets.
Start being real.
That brings me to the next change I'll make to reduce this Instagram envy I feel so often... Start being real on social media. Not glorifying anything. If I'm gonna post, I'm gonna post the good, the bad, and the grey area in between. Not everything has to be so glorious! And it's not! The idea of leaving out parts of my life to make it appear better than it really just feels like lying to me. I'm not at all saying that I don't have a great life or that I'm not lucky to be where I am or anything, but even down here in Savannah where it's been 80 degrees for a month and I haven't yet had a single test this year, I still encounter situations and feelings that are less than ideal. On Monday I woke up at 7:00 am for the fourth day in a row despite the fact that I didn't have an alarm set and didn't have class until 5:00 pm. I was unable to fall back asleep (per usual) and spent the whole day dragging my feet and getting grumpier and grumpier with every minute that ticked by. I eventually crawled back into bed and spent 45 minutes watching youtube videos to pass the time and disassociate myself from what I was feeling in real life at that moment. I scrolled through my camera roll to try to find a cute picture to post to get some validation. I couldn't find one and got even more sorry for myself. Then I dragged my feet to class at 4:30 pm and spent the next 3 hours drifting in and out of consciousness as my teacher droned on about photoshop features that I'll never use. It wasn't a great day. And that is okay.
We have this idea that all of our days need to look a certain way to be worth posting and all of our posts need to get a certain response in order to be worth sharing, but I'd like to challenge this. My life just doesn't always look like my Instagram feed does, it's as simple as that. But with Instagram being such a big way that we keep up with our friends' and family's lives today, especially in college when I'm thousands of miles away from home. And I don't wanna pretend that college is all fun and games anymore.
ok so I did go to the beach today but this was the only documentation of it. my life is great but i don't NEED to show it off to validate that fact!
Going Forward...
There are plenty of great days and just as many shitty ones. There are a LOT of just okay days too. I deleted Instagram (and Snapchat) on the 1st of May with the intent of keeping the app(s) off my phone until the 1st of June. I just want to stop living for the Instagram picture and start living for the memory. If I'm not having a good day I'm gonna write about it and if I have a great day then I'll do the same. Maybe after a month-long cleanse from comparing my life to that of others, I'll be able to believe that not everything I see online is how things really are, and be able to be more real without caring so much about the response I'm gonna get in my notifications tab. I have high hopes for this month, and high hopes for this movement of being real.