By Alexandria Benedict
If you look at my profile online, there’s about 193 photos that were carefully chosen, edited and posted to meet a type of “Instagram standard,” whatever that means. Each one is used to create a profile that depicts this personna of myself to the world. From an analytical standpoint, I look like an average 21-year-old girl, that loves to party in the city, has a lot of friends, a loving family, a perfect boyfriend and not a single care in the world.
There’s a mixture of photos from parties, girls nights, date nights, trips, but the majority of photos are from nights out at bars and clubs, getting dolled up, getting drunk and not remembering much the next morning.
On average my posts get about 300 likes from my over 1,000 followers. My inbox is filled with different club promoters and friends messaging me, telling me to come out every weekend, or that I missed a fun night while I was at another club. I get a lot of comments from my friends – both online and in real life – asking me about my party stories and telling me that I live a wild and crazy life.
“I just want to party with you guys,” they’ll say, or “You girls look like you’re having so much fun.” In reality, the life I show on social media is not even close to my reality.
I’ll be honest when I say that my Instagram profile is a perfect representation of who I want people to think I am, but it’s a far stretch from who I actually am.
It’s easy to look at my Instagram and assume the type of person I am: the class A party girl that chases boys, hops on to any mainstream trend and cares more about popularity and myself more than anything or anyone else.
What people don’t see, is me. I’m a girl who would rather sit at home alone in bed on a Friday night rather than party. Everyday I wake up knowing that I have to fight mental demons that consume my mind, whether it’s anxiety or my depression. People don’t see the hurt behind my posts, or the fact that I associate likes on a photo with who likes me as a person and the constant need for validation from other people to believe that I’m good enough.
In the end, the pressure to keep up this narrative ended up consuming me almost as much as my mental illness.
While most people use partying and drinking to have fun, I was using it excessively to escape my depression and inner problems. Being able to show a fun side of myself online made it feel like my problems are almost nonexistent because no one knew about them. I figured that if I could just pretend that this is who I am, everyone would assume I was living the perfect life.
What was once an app that was used strictly to like and comment on photos and share moments with loved ones, Instagram has become a competition with all of your followers to see who is living the best life. It’s all about who can get the most likes on a photo, who can hit the most clubs in a weekend and who is the “happiest” and the “most fit” girl on your feed. It’s a world that every user is roped into, whether we claim to be affected by it or not.
Unfortunately for most millennials, our social media presence has become an extension of who we are as a whole – whether we like it or not. This narrative we play into feeds the notion that sharing anything that strays away from perfection is unacceptable.
The perfection of my Instagram profile is something that both consumes and embarrasses me. It’s become a form of escapism from the reality outside of the app. Everything on Instagram feels so structured and competitive. No one posts for their own satisfaction anymore. It’s either to impress or to conceal.
We’re surrounded by bloggers who keep up their Instagram aesthetic for money and celebrities who make it seem like fame is the ultimate happiness. It’s not a shock that I, and so many, people get sucked into it.
At the end of the day, escapism isn’t a bad thing. Trying to take a break from the stress of real life is a natural thing. Instagram was made to show the art of self expression, not to conceal what we’re actually feeling to portray this incorrect version of ourselves. We’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that it’s normal to be stressed to the max; to take on too much, yet we’ve also conditioned ourselves to still try look like we have our shit together. But we don’t– and that’s okay.
You have to remember who you are. At the end of the day, people are going to remember you as you and not who you were on social media. Don’t forget to ask yourself, who are you offline?