Navigating my love-hate of social media (Part 1)
The “22 days of being human” challenge
Just before my trip to the US, I birthed an Instagram challenge with my friend Ann. It was borne out of a bitch session about how same-y social media has become. We were griping about how packaged and produced everything is nowadays.
We were like a couple of Insta OG grannies in our rockers on the porch, reminiscing about how much better it was back in the day — when we used to post latte art or a nice sunset. We were simply sharing beautiful slices of life with friends.
No script. No production. No call to action.
Now we see a sea of wannabe influencers jumping to the almighty algorithm: using formulas, following trends, proffering psychological hooks to grab attention, and relying on AI to write captions. Ugh. Where have the humans gone? Did they all get gobbled up by personal brands?
I said, why don’t we do something to shift this? Let’s make a challenge to bring the “Insta” back to Instagram. She agreed, so we met the next day to make a video post introducing the idea, and #22daysofbeinghuman the Instagram challenge was born.
The process of doing this for 22 days went so much deeper than I could have anticipated. It was not just a challenge. It was a full-on initiation.
My announced intention was to post one spontaneous uncut video daily. This revealed to me many parts of myself that are not allowed to be seen, according to my internal security team. Whenever I was not feeling cute or clever (most days, frankly), I had huge resistance to showing up.
As the number of days that “I didn’t feel like it” started piling up, I saw how little of the truth of how I am, actually fits inside my preferred identity. But doing it anyway was powerful medicine for me.
I showed up tired. I showed up angry. I showed up when my skin was looking ugly. I showed up scattered. I showed up boring. I showed up while in bed with a migraine. The exercise of showing up no matter what was happening, or how I was feeling, turned out to be an inoculation against shame. It was an anti-serum to perfectionism. It was an image management detox, which helped me clear the blockage of creative constipation.
It felt like a miracle. I showed up exactly as I was, repeatedly, and… gasp! nothing bad happened to me. I didn’t get attacked. I didn’t get booed off the Internet. Most people didn’t even notice. A handful unfollowed me when I first started doing the challenge; but after 22 days, I actually ended up with more followers than when I started.
As I witnessed my friends who were going through this challenge with me, I observed how we are all captured by our insecurities. There was a whole garden of variety, with every insecurity that I could imagine and many that had never occurred to me. Women that I perceive as beautiful, confident, eloquent and funny… they were struggling to show up too.
I worry about the dark spots on my skin. Another friend frets about the bags she sees under her eyes. Someone else hesitates because she thinks she’s put on too much weight. This influencer who publishes amazing content feels ashamed about her English grammar. One of my most charismatic friends hesitates because she has nothing to talk about.
Social media has us spinning around in a crazy fun house of imaginary mirrors. We spend an incredible amount of time thinking about what others think of us, and editing ourselves accordingly to be more pleasing or more acceptable. But the harsh truth is most people are not thinking about us at all. Not for more than a fleeting moment anyway.
Yet because all of the self-imposed judgment and self-imposed criticism, we silence ourselves. We hesitate to take up space. Even online, where space is unlimited. Even on our own account, where we are the only one posting.
I could post 8 hours of boring lectures on my Instagram every day without taking space away from anyone else. Yet I stop myself, in paralysis from perfectionism. Yet I dilute my message, with a performance orientation.
This 22-day challenge created a big shift for me in the way that I am relating to social media, and how I want to engage with it. I saw myself under the spell of using online spaces as a source of validation — a bottomless well perhaps, feeding an insatiable thirst. Now, with greater awareness, I want to steer into using these spaces as a forum for self-expression and connection instead.
The programming is elegantly designed and its hooks are in deep, so it’s not easy to show up on social media without being hypnotized into mindless scrolling and becoming addicted to dopamine. I am still in the process of figuring that out for myself. That is what I will explore in part two.
PS More and more people keep joining the Instagram challenge. If you want to know the details, check the pinned posts on my profile.