I Am Not Me

I find it oddly entertaining how many different personalities I have.

When I’m surrounded by my peers, classmates, and/or acquaintances, I am as calm can be.

When I’m surrounded by my best friends, all hell breaks loose and I’m wild as can be.

When I’m surrounded by my family, I am obedient as can be.

However, when I’m on social media, I’m not sure if I’m any of the above.

A week or two ago, my English teacher had showed us an article on a girl who had quit not only Instagram, where she claimed her fame, but also every social media accounts she owned. The reason as to why Essena O’Neil, the one who quit social media, decided to do what she did was because she didn’t feel like the way she was living was “real”.

She had told all of her followers that every picture that she posted on her Instagram was a sham, the way she had to pose a specific way, or the way she had to suck in her stomach to get the picture just right. She didn’t want to show people the life everyone thought was real, she didn’t want to advocate the fake life she was living.

This had me thinking, who am I?

Whenever I was connected to social media, I had always posted things that seemed socially acceptable. I never made myself look like an idiot, always posting things that I know for sure would get some recognition. If it didn’t exceed my expectations by a certain amount of time, I would delete it, feeling absolutely embarrassed of what content I had posted.

This process had become such a daily occurance in my life, that my content soon became someone’s elses thoughts rather than my own.

Yes, it was me typing the tweet, posing for the photo, and typing a caption.

My actions all my own but my thoughts corrupted.

Funny how the acceptance from the community influences the individual’s thoughts.

And it’s strange to think that no matter how hard we try to “be ourselves” like everyone says to be, we are only the people we want to be. Not the people we truly are supposed to be.

We go through our lives, watching other people live their lives through our own eyes. Wishing that we could be them or atleast do what they do. Yet no one realizes that we only allow society to see what we want society to see.

But I wonder, if we were to look at our own lives in another person’s perspective for a day, would we still live the same life we’re living now?