What Makes it in the Frame: Who We Are on Social Media vs. Who We Are in Real Life

I’ve been on Instagram for not even a full year and this idea of trying to capture a certain angle of my life for people to see has officially become ingrained into me. I find myself experiencing a moment with my parents or friends or whomever it may be and I can’t seem to separate the picture I want to touch up and edit for people who follow me and the beauty in the untouched picture. Even with “finstas” reserved for only our friends or people who are close to us, I find myself crafting and nitpicking this artificial, and divided version of myself instead of communicating who I, authentically and unconditionally am. I’m not saying that social media is a place to tell people “Hey I’m getting a divorce” or “ I just lost half of my friends”. There is undeniably a line that must be drawn between our personal lives and what we put out on social media, but at what point does who we make ourselves to be on social media become a completely false representation of who we are? At what point do we begin to expect more from a virtual and crafted life than from reality? 

Nowadays, people are more what they hide than what they show. We live in a world where people have the ability to cultivate an alternate persona, separate from who they are in real life. We pick which parts make us into the people we want to be and we hide the pieces that make us human and that undeniably make us, ourselves. When we give ourselves the power to create avatars, and the power to provide status updates for whoever follows us at the touch of a button, we inevitably create a distorted sense of reality and identity on both sides of the screen. The viewer ends up falling deeper into a mentality revolving around comparison while the creator feeding into that mentality creates an unhealthy relationship between who they are on social media and who they are in their real life. More often than not, people use social media to create something or someone they are not. 

I went to sleepaway camp this last summer for the first time, and for five weeks,  which was the reason I got Instagram. All of the girls I had met had for some reason exchanged social media instead of phone numbers, so I figured I would have to get it if I wanted to stay in touch with them. My first post was about camp and thus my inauguration into this game of trying to make myself “picture perfect”. That first post was a lie. I had painted my experience in camp as the best summer of my life. A teenage-coming fo-age movie-esque summer captured through the lens of a vintage camera. But my summer was not a coming-of-age movie and wasn’t as picturesque as that vintage, polaroid filter had made it seem. That summer was full of a lot of complex emotions about being away from home and from my mom and what was normal. It was only five weeks but those five weeks were unlike anything I had ever experienced. The point is that that first post was not 100% truthful. And I was feeding into that tradition of capturing a moment but leaving out everything that doesn’t fit in the frame. A few months after I got home and I had posted about my friends and me, I got a letter from my camp friends telling me how much fun I seemed to be having and I just remember thinking “What?”. On their side of the phone, my life was free of every emotion and conflict those pictures didn’t capture.

In the span of a few months, I found myself becoming obsessed with this version of myself I was communicating to people who followed me. I would check every story to see how many people had viewed it (I was mostly trying to reassure myself that people had seen who I wanted them to see) and I would obsess over how many people had liked my posts. How many people have seen this version of me? How many of them are convinced of it? I slowly found that through these photos, I was making up for everything I couldn’t say. I was making up for everything people didn’t know about me. People who I didn’t and still don’t hang out with but know in passing would follow me like it’s some social rule we need to follow each other and through these pictures, and I would try to tell these people “I’m excited! I promise! I’m not just the girl you see reading at school! I’m not just everything I don’t say!”.

Especially in recent decades, there has been a rise in a culture surrounding validation and comparison. We have this need to be assured that the path we are taking is the ‘right’ one and usually deeming that path ‘right’, depends on the opinions of others. And consequently, there is this disconnection between who we are and who we want people to see us as. It’s almost as if every picture we post is a means to prove that we are interesting. And if the number of views keeps going up, then that must mean we’re doing something right. Instead of addressing those emotions and trying to deal with why we feel as if we fall short in some aspects of our lives, we turn to social media and present ourselves in a way we would like to be seen. We have collectively started to live for the approval and validation of others and we have created a culture devoted to it. I’m just 16 and it pains me to think about how much time I have wasted trying to force people to think of me in a certain way and even just to make them think I’m interesting. But my life is not the pictures and filters that I carefully nit-pick. I am not the Instagram page that I have cultivated. And recently I have come to fear that that’s who people believe me to be. I don’t want to be “picture-perfect”. I want to be me. 

It’s okay to embrace the online world, but sometimes, especially as teenagers, we reach a point when the online world defines our inner lives and thoughts. And even though we are constantly reminded of the saying “nothing on social media is real”, the moment our fingers click on a story or scroll through a stream of posts, the cycle begins again and those emotions end up resurfacing. But frankly, social media is not the real world and is only what we make it. The app itself isn’t the problem. It is what we have turned it into and the power we have given it. It is nothing more than a vessel for comparison. And comparison, as we know,  is the thief of all joy. So next time that jealousy, or feelings of comparison, or inadequacy, or whatever it might be, stir up when you click on someone's post, remember that one picture is not the whole story.