Social Medium

“I just feel like it’s performative” who is saying this? I don’t know, some random person on instagram, nobody I’ve met in person. They are talking about putting emojis over your child’s face on social media. There is a debate going on about whether that decision is good or bad, cool or uncool, hot or not. My first reaction to seeing people call this stupid was hurt, my next was “I don’t care what you think about my parenting choices.” But it’s been bouncing around in my head, it gives me pause before posting. So, clearly I do care. I have questioned whether I should change my Substack profile pic, which is of me and Matt and our daughter in Yosemite with a flower over her face. Is it performative? I had to think about that for a while. Yes, it’s performative, that’s the point. Everything I do on social media is a bit of a performance. If it wasn’t, my profiles would be private.

At the same time I try to be an honest version of myself. I am vulnerable and flawed and I like to show that. Partly because I drank the kool aid of SOCIAL media. We are all just humans trying to reach our tendrils through our screens and connect. Although, that's not the case anymore, there are a lot of bot accounts these days capitalizing on our human need for connection. And that brings me to my second reason for being “real” on social media. I am unique, complex and hard to imitate and that is valuable. In the creative industry our lives are quickly becoming the only things we can claim as ours.

Which, it turns out, works for me because sharing myself has always been my preferred creative endeavor. I chose shameless vulnerability as a career before AI started squeezing the life out of the creative industry. It scratches an itch, a millennial, middle child, abandonment issues, anxious attachment itch. If you don’t have that itch, God bless you, because I need an audience. So yes it’s a performance, but the performance is me or I am the performance, it’s hard to tell at this point.

Though it does feel good sometimes, it also feels terrible. Making my public facing social media profile so personal is a risk. If someone doesn’t like a post that means they don’t like me. I don’t like people not liking me, even if I dislike them, the idea of them not liking me is deeply unsettling. So, I end up curating what I share to avoid that feeling. I try not to, but the fear of judgement creeps in. Sometimes I don’t know what came first, my beliefs or the beliefs of my audience that I reverse engineered to be my own. It’s a mind fuck, but I’m too deep in to change course now and I’m honestly curious to see how it plays out. It’s like a highly volatile experiment where I am both the scientist and the subject.

Anyone who’s spent a significant amount of time on social media knows that it thrives on anger, judgment and fear. People hawk up the darkest, most hateful parts of themselves and spit them into the comment section. It can be shocking and painful. When Matt had his stroke plenty of people online wished him well, but people also publicly gloated. To be fair, I guess, Matt has publicly gloated when war criminals have suffered. That means he deserves the hate of strangers. People have made comments about my appearance. One guy got obsessed with my smile and wouldn’t stop commenting that it was too big and it must be fake. He commented on every post of mine for months. It seems small but it did get under my skin, I started second guessing myself when I smiled. Insulting someone's smile is a vile thing to do, it’s like stealing joy. But social media is just like that.

Knowing all of this I choose not to put my child’s face on social media. I want her to have the choice and wherewithal to know the weight of the choice of whether or not to be on social media. Whether or not to sell her soul. And yes, I put emojis over her face, especially in the beginning because it is a performance. The performance is saying that she is off limits, it’s a very clear communication to my audience that I am protective of her. I share a lot of the back of her head, but that could be misconstrued as accidental. I want it to be clear that it is a purposeful choice. You don’t get to have her.

Unless you know me personally, then please message me and I will send tons of photos and videos. She’s adorable and perfect and I’m dying to share!