Social Anxiety

Sharing--or not sharing--your mess of a life online.

The other day I was depressed, so I posted about it on Instagram. I don’t usually do this; I am much more likely to buy a dress printed with sandwiches just so that I can take a picture of me in the dress eating a sandwich, because apart from anxiety, attention-whoring is my main mental illness. 

Honestly, what is wrong with me? Also this dress was too big and I had to return it.

But sometimes I worry that my online life doesn’t accurately reflect my real one. I worry that people will think I am always silly and irreverent and having so much fun laughing at myself and my kids and the way life sucks balls sometimes, but you know, in a cute way. Here are some things that take place regularly in my life that I do not share on Instagram: 

1. Me, stomping around putting away laundry or picking up dirty dishes or wiping pee stains and inexplicable hair (how? and why?) from under the toilet seat, my resentment about the fact that I am the ONLY PERSON IN THIS HOUSE who cares about not living in ABSOLUTE FILTH calcify into my bones.

2. Me delivering my weekly anxious monologue to Jeff about how I CANNOT BE EXPECTED TO DO ALL THE DOMESTIC WORK AND CHILDCARE AND ALSO FIND THE MENTAL SPACE TO WRITE, which often ends in me crying, or following Jeff into his office to yell at him about how he isn’t listening to me and doesn’t understand me at all on a fundamental level.

3. My older son spending at least two hours a day watching grown men scream about Minecraft or Roblox on YouTube, which I feel tremendous guilt about because it is undoubtedly rotting his brain, destroying his eyes, and probably also turning him into some soulless capitalist robot bro who calls things “epic” and “sick,” but on the other hand, I really need uninterrupted time to angrily fold all that laundry.

4. My younger son crying and whining every time I leave the room, or ignore him for more than 27 consecutive seconds, because he is four, and also possibly because I nursed him for way too long, and maybe all of my neuroses came out through my breastmilk and shot straight into his brain, where I imagine it’s like the movie Inside Out except every character is Anxiety, and all of his core memories are of YouTube shows where disembodied women’s hands with janky manicures open LOL dolls.

Now, all of the above are hard to capture in a single still image (although GIFs of people stumbling backwards into swimming pools can be a decent substitute), so I suppose I can be forgiven for sweeping these mundane every day stresses under the digital rug. But I often think about the outsized role that social media has come to play in our real lives, and whether its increasing ubiquity requires an increasing level of honesty. Back in the halcyon days of MySpace, when nobody knew the word “app” and you could review your friends like Yelp restaurants, online exchanges represented maybe 5% of the average person’s social life. Today, especially given the isolation brought on by the pandemic, it might easily be 90%. I have people I consider good friends whose faces I haven’t seen up close in years! Every time I like one of their photos or status updates, I think of it as an act of emotional support. So does that mean I need to show more of my own life in its messy, chaotic, mostly non-photogenic entirety? I don’t know. I think it depends, in the end, on what you think social media is for.

This, I think, is the main reason we all drive each other so batshit crazy online: social media has different rules for everyone. For some, it seems straightforward: a simple way to stay in touch with friends and family, sharing life milestones, mundane updates, and snapshots of dependent kids and animals. Some people post their diet plans or Wordle scores or maps from their daily runs, sending a little self-celebratory “I did a thing!” announcement echoing out into the void. Food! Cats! Babies! Nails! Inspirational Quotes aplenty! Gifs! (And if you happen to hate food, or pets, or children, or hair tutorials, God—a.k.a. the mute button—save you). Then again, for other people social media is more like a battleground of information—a fertile if GMO-filled field for spreading ideas (I’ll admit I use Twitter as my most reliable breaking news source). For many, especially people whose career success depends on building an “audience,” it’s a self-promotion machine that acts like a digital hype man. And finally, for a small but mighty group of celebrities and “influencers,” social media is a way to create and monetize their own personal, aspirational brands. This last group, I think, has caused the most collective grief and confusion. Because when we scroll past photos of beautiful people looking happy (or, at least, as if they haven’t wept into their hands while on the toilet recently) all the time, we begin to subconsciously believe that a picture of a moment represents the truth of a life.

I want to digress here to tell you that I have, at age 41, only recently realized that happiness is no different than any other feeling in terms of frequency and staying power. For most of my life, I have treated it like a goal post in the distance which, once reached, would become a resting state. But it doesn’t work that way. It took me a long time and a lot of toilet crying to realize that happiness comes and goes like any emotion; it’s fluid and fleeting. The real trick is catching yourself in blissful moments, holding them in your heart and mind like you’re cupping your hands around a firefly, and then letting them go when they fade. Feel free to tattoo this paragraph on your butt or something because I know it’s extremely profound.

I know this is a butterfly and not a firefly, I promise I’m not trying to mix metaphors here.

I don’t personally take anyone’s social media profile at face value. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit of a narcissist, but I assume everyone else is just like me: posting what they want to show, and keeping all of the unflattering shit to themselves. I don’t have to see a video of someone fighting with their partner or stage whispering threats to their screaming child in line at the grocery store to assume that it happens. But I also know some people who really suffer when they compare their lives to other people’s online. I had one friend who would repeatedly tag her posts #nofakebooking, which suggests that she saw the lack of everyday sadness, stress, and rage in social media posts as a kind of betrayal.

I see her point, and acknowledge the validity of her feelings, but I don’t necessarily agree. The way I think about it is in relation to the photos people display on the walls of their homes. Walk into any house, whether its residents are toxically positive “choose joy” welcome mat types or unrepentant messes both mentally and physically, and the photos framed inside tend to be happy ones. No one frames a snapshot of a family funeral or a sobbing toddler. We pick the sweet, cute, cheerful moments to look at every day. The other stuff--the fights, fears, mistakes, sadnesses and days spent numbing ourselves to the existential pain of being human--that’s all kept private. I say “private” and not “secret” because I don’t believe not sharing pain is a lie by omission. I think it’s a basic instinct.

This is a weird segue, and I realize I’ve mentioned being on the toilet a couple of times already, but sometimes I like to remind myself that everyone poops. Picture your ultimate celebrity or IRL crush, the one so sexy you’d leave your family for one night spent exploring their body and learning the secrets of their skincare regimen. That person poops! Angelina Jolie teeters into her giant mansion bathroom on those delicate ankles, pops a squat, and takes a shit. She probably even farts! I promise this scatalogical digression has a point, and it is this: Everyone suffers, too. We might not all have the same problems, but we all suffer the consequences of being alive. We all want to love and be loved, and we fuck up at it constantly. We want to find meaning in our lives and we take all kinds of ill-advised detours drawing the map. We want to know ourselves, and we spend decades chipping away at our dark and trembling centers, only to realize again and again that we are mysteries that even we may not be able to solve. So what chance does anyone else stand?

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I think it’s OK for social media to be fake sometimes, and it’s also great to let it be real when and if we feel brave enough. But as consumers in this dystopian society in which most of us cultivate online personas that represent only a fraction of who we really are, scrolling through each other’s feeds should be done with the understanding that we’re only scratching the surface of another person’s existence. We’re looking at the store display windows, not the stockroom. We’re looking only at what we’re allowed to see. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when you look at my photos and posts, I want you to know that they are only moments, little flashes of a much more complicated life. A smiling child. A thirsty selfie. A stupid street sign. A grown woman in a too-large sandwich print dress, standing inside her refrigerator, just trying to get through the day.