Curated Reality

After watching a recent video Jack Harries - The Stories We Tell, it had me thinking on the reality that we've created online. And by we I mean everyone - bloggers, the casual instagrammer, the ones who have theirs on private, the sarcastic person on twitter etc. For one thing, it made me realize that there is a fourth wall that we aren't able to open - all we see on social media is the user wants us to see, nothing more. When Jack mentioned what we see online is what we've curated for ourselves, it kind of lit a miniature lightbulb in my head. And by that I mean hello social media existential crisis. 

I started thinking to myself when others see my Instagram or Twitter what do they think? What type of person do I come across as? Am I the same online as I am in person? 

I began scrolling through my Twitter account and I can 110% confirm sarcastic me in caps lock most of the time is me in real life. I'm invested in politics and there is a sprinkle of that here and there too. Okay, probably a bit more than a sprinkle. (I'm actually genuinely convinced a few of my internet friends have me on mute because I may clog up their timeline).

If I scroll through my twitter, the politics side of me is there and that sometimes worries me. I put my blog on my resume - of course I did ya girl was not a dedicated blogging cupcake for this not to be on full display - and something I worry about is am I too political? Am I speaking too much about the separation of child & parent and the children being in cages like animals? Will this be the deciding factor of do I get the job or not? But, whenever these thoughts float around in my mind, I remember the quote by Desmond Tutu: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

There are some sarcastic - a little bit too sarcastic - tweets that never make it onto my twitter account because there's always the lingering fear of will this hurt me professionally? That's usually when I put the tweet to my drafts and come back to it later in the day.

There's also a sprinkle of coding, running, and a little extra stuff here and there on my account. I'm trying to find a balance between coding, running and politics - still juggling a bit with the evenness of all three but I'll get there eventually.

Next stop, Instagram. Two weeks ago, after scrolling for a bit, I realized something. My captions are full of my personality - I'm pretty sarcastic and always find the humor in things so that was a check in the is-this-really-me category. My fitness photos usually have pretty long captions as I describe the workout I did & my thoughts on progression/building up mileage etc. My other photos - on the rare occasion that I'm not actually in workout gear and someone actually takes a photo of me - this rarely happens as you can see by my instagram account - are me, obviously. All of them are. But not really. There are some photos where I'm gazing in the distance - what's in the distance? Nothing. It's in those posed photos that I don't see me. The squint in the distance? I don't know her. 

Me taking a photo goes a lot like this: Fumbling with my hands, not knowing what exactly I should be doing with my hands most of the time, making awkward expressions because uh wow not sure if I should smile or look cool and stare into the distance. Those photos where my personality was on 110% were tossed into the category outtakes. 

There is a photogenic side of me that kind of exists (maybe somewhere WAY deep down. If inner me can find her and call her to the surface when I take photos for my blog that would be GREAT) and then there's me in my natural habitat being awkward and random at the same time. This video, and the process of me scrolling through my social media accounts, made me realize something. 

Maybe the perfect picture that we want to be taken of us lies in the imperfect ones. The outtakes of you fumbling what to do with your hands, the random facial expressions, the shrugging of shoulders. Maybe those are the ones that capture your personality the way it is supposed to be captured, not ~perfect~ lean to the left, head tilt at an acute angle and hands placed ~naturally~ at your sides.

I've recently been making more of effort to take y'know natural photos of me in my natural habitat. Still have a bit more to go but if you follow me over on instagram, you may have seen a shift in photos I've been uploading. You can be sure to expect some more photos of me cheekily grinning at the camera, shrugging my shoulders, and a sprinkle of awkward facial expressions. All of that is the real me and won't be tossed in the outtakes category anymore. 

So, now I have a question for you! If you scroll through your social media accounts - is that the real you?

TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE