If you’re someone who puts a lot of their life on social media the way that I do, you too have probably realized that no matter how neutral or unbiased you try to be, you cannot possibly be everything to everyone. It is impossible to make every single person happy. I started my Instagram page and this blog as a way to share my experiences and insight on the struggles I have faced while living with an incurable illness. I continue to do so in the hopes that my writing can reach the right people at the right times in their lives. I like to think about the idea that people who will need to see my posts may not need them for a while, but when they do, they’ll be here waiting. I also find a lot of joy in knowing that people who found my posts years ago have evolved in their own ways and have reached the point where many of my old posts are no longer applicable to them. My hope for everyone who can relate to any part of my journey is that they don’t stay stuck in one place or one thought pattern for too long. We all need to move forward and continue to learn and grow.
I find it to be a beautiful thing that writing is meant to be something you can revisit, but you get to close the book, or exit the page and be free of it whenever you’d like to be. Simply put, I don’t expect that everyone will have an appetite for what it is that I focus on at all times. I am not for everyone, nor do I try to be. In my opinion, that’s far too much of a burden for any one person to have to bear. I’ve found my corner where I feel at home and full of purpose and I know that what I write here doesn’t solve for every issue in the world, nor does it take into account every individual’s circumstances. I like to hope that for those people, there are others out there who they may relate to and find inspiring because none of us want to ever feel that we are alone.
There will always be people who don’t see things the way that you do, no matter what your stance is. There will always be people who are in different positions than you are and who have more or less resources to work with than you do. For every single person out there trying to motivate or inspire people who can relate to them, there are millions of people who cannot relate to them at all. This is a large reason why I believe that there is always enough room in any industry for someone new to do what someone else has already done. No one should be allowed to monopolize the human experience, the ideas we have, the attention we hold, or the things we stand for. They are all borrowed or shared. When we are born, we inherit them and when we die, what’s left of us lives on in those who care to remember. Not to be too philosophical, but we truly are just passing through and trying to experience what is special about this world along the way. What is most special to me is love and connection.
I fear that a lot of people have lost sight of their relationship with social media and how to use it in a way that is healthy and productive for them. I can openly admit that at one point, I was definitely one of those people. When I was least happy with myself, I resented people who were living better than I was and I thought that they promoted unattainable lifestyles. Meanwhile, I was the one choosing to consume their content and weaponized it against my own self-image while taking no responsibility for the role I was playing in seeking it out. I believe that the way we feel about social media says a lot more about us than it does social media. We forget how much control over our intake of information we still have. Sure, there are ads, algorithms and I am definitely not ignoring the man behind the curtain pulling the levers and flipping the switches. However, to blame social media for a lot of things that we can control is a huge mistake that is still our mistake to make.
I think about the average amount of accounts I see other people following and I wonder how on earth it is possible to even begin to try to keep up with that many lives and narratives all at once. With hundreds upon thousands of people they follow, the posts must be endless. Yet, by following them, we are basically giving those people and their accounts discretion as to what we will see and when. Their posts pop up in our feed when they choose to post them. We see what it is they want us to see. I wonder how many of those posts even matter to us; how many inspire us or resonate with us in some way that isn’t superficial?
I know I have talked about this before, but I do want to revisit the idea that it is unnatural for us to see and follow the lives of so many people all at once. Before social media and the internet, we all only had the capacity to really know about 100 people at one time. While our worlds were a bit smaller and some of our ideas were possibly less evolved than they are now with this kind of unprecedented exposure, so were our stresses of keeping up with things that don’t have a real impact on our day to day lives. So, too, were our feelings of needing to be perfect, look perfect, post perfect, and cater to what we believe other people value in us. We didn’t filter our lives as much, or go places to take thirty photos to get the perfect shot that will fit the aesthetic of our Instagram feed. We simply didn’t have enough space to hold all of those expectations all at once. We had about 100 faces to compare our own to. We didn’t see, nor did we care what other people were wearing or eating or doing unless we were spending time with them. The lives and activities of other people occupied so much less space in our brains. Instead of seeing endless photos of the most conventionally beautiful and edited faces in the world on an endless loop, we saw the smiles of our friends and loves ones looking back at us. We felt our worth the most when we felt connected through real time, everyday interactions.
Unfortunately, I think far too much emphasis has been put on the idea of “following” people. We become addicted to being fed things that we may like, rather than seeking out the things we want to see when we actually want to see them. Personally, I don’t follow a lot of people on social media. I don’t follow celebrities, I don’t follow brands (unless they’re a small business or charity that I support or work with) and I limit the time I spend on it all together. I quickly realized that after removing myself from my previous account where I did the complete opposite, I was a lot happier and I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything by removing myself from what I thought was “relevant.”
I went back and logged into my old account prior to writing this. I went into the list of hundreds of accounts I’d followed and I saw a slew of funny meme accounts, celebrities, random people I assume I met in bars over 10 years ago, people I had no desire to actually keep in touch with, siblings of ex boyfriends, husbands and wives of ex coworkers… it was comical. Most of these people, while I’m sure are lovely people, were not people who needed to be in my daily intake.
Unfollowing someone has become this big dramatic thing but I bet if people couldn’t see who was following them or not, more people would feel free of having to keep up with the lives of people who aren’t meaningfully a part of theirs anymore. We may get curious from time to time, but do we really actually care what they’re doing? If we removed the idea of “following” and simply could visit the pages of people we are thinking about, I think people would post more authentically. There would be so much more diversity in what we see because people wouldn’t be trying as hard to fit a mold.
I get constant emails and messages from accounts, real or not, telling me that I am not maximizing the potential I have to gain more followers because my page doesn’t have an aesthetic or a theme that draws in potential followers. “Experts” say I should make it more cohesive and choose a color palate and edit my photos so they’re all consistently lit and portrayed. My page lacks unification of content. While I totally understand why an aesthetically appealing page is something that people may really like and enjoy for themselves, especially if they’re using it to express their artistic eye or skill in design, I don’t subscribe to that ideology for myself.
Because my page is about my life and my illness that causes most of my day to look very different from the one before and after it, I appreciate that my page doesn’t shade them all together as one. I like the idea that I don’t have to make it appealing to more people. I am not trying to maximize anything but my own potential to live the best life that I can. The unity I would like to create exists so much further than the reaches of my grid of pictures I have posted. I would like for someone to feel unified with me through the substance of what I share and the stories that I tell. I love the idea that they may take something meaningful from something I have written and create even more unity by sharing it with someone else who may never visit my website. The point, to bring this full circle, is that the same words sound different from everyone who says them. While my voice may not be the vehicle that the messages I want to share travel by to where they need to go, I am still contributing in the ways that I can to put them out there. How and when they find their way to the people who need them, is so much less up to me than the people who will choose to hear them.
We get to decide what we feed our minds and our hearts. We get to filter out the unnecessary noise and not only choose what we consume, but also who feeds it to us and when. Don’t miss the little opportunities to control your own atmosphere and stop focusing on the things that aren’t serving you in a meaningful way. I promise, the world will open up the less of it you view through the posts of others and the more you get out there and experience it for yourself. I hope this helps anyone who may need to see it.
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