Connect

It had been a week since I pushed the delete button on social media.

The first few days felt odd. I’d pick up my phone, almost instinctively, and find myself scrolling through apps. Muscle memory had my thumb tapping on the spot the Instagram icon used to be, only for the Weather Network to pop up. By day three, I had memorized the entire fourteen day forecast.

Whenever I took a picture, be it of a sleepy dog or leftover spaghetti with a concerning amount of Parmesan cheese, I remembered I couldn’t share it with the world. The humorous captions I thought of would have to be kept to myself.

I was sure when I deleted Instagram the only type of validation I would lose would be related to superficial selfies or the brief high I received when someone threw me an “lol” on a funny story. What I came to realize, rather shockingly, was that the validation ran much deeper.

I had documented my entire life on that app. Every birthday, anniversary, holiday. The first snowfall of the season. Walking through a muddy forest. Standing on the sand while the lake water lapped at my feet. My first day at a new job. Ringing in another year. Drinking a cup of coffee with a good book. The dog sprawled out on the end of the bed. Graduating from university. Getting a new plant. A particularly good meal. Getting married. Light filtering through the trees and casting such serene shadows that the million thoughts running through my head paused, if only for a second.

It was these moments. The ones that cause you to stop what you’re doing so that you can capture and remember them. When I shared it online, it wasn’t just for likes and comments, it was a testament to being alive. It allowed me to share the world with others as I saw it, so that they may bear witness to my interpretation of life.

But, of course, I wasn’t sharing it all.

I wasn’t sharing the hard times. The heartache. The boredom. The mundane. The chores. The struggling. The days that felt so heavy I couldn’t get out of bed. 

This online persona, it wasn’t really me. It was a version of myself I had curated to represent what I hoped to be. In doing so, I interacted with other online personas, mistaking these conversations for real human connection.

No one on social media can truly be themselves. Consciously or not, we’re either giving people what we think they want to see, or we’re tricking ourselves into thinking this is who we really are. These pictures are snapshots, brief moments in time, but they never tell the whole story. 

Eventually, we realize it’s all smoke and mirrors. 

I suppose what I’m saying is that I handed the validation of my entire existence to an app. In last week's post I wrote how my online life felt so real that I interpreted deleting social media as a type of death, and I very much feel that now. Short of coming off as incredibly dramatic, I am mourning my online life, as frivolous as it was.

The connections I created will stay there, in that world of make believe. My online persona, the one who I had hoped to be, will fade away. Now that the scrolling has stopped, the only thing in front of me is the raw reality of the one thing I tried so hard to distract myself from:

Me.