Opening Up About My Toxic Relationship…
This piece is a part of MUSE Online’s 2022 Mental Health Theme Week. The MUSE team would like to emphasize that this piece may be triggering to some as it touches on topics of mental health and mental illness.
Disclaimer: MUSE Online acknowledges and makes it known that this piece is based on a personal experience and recognizes that others may have differing experiences.
When I was in high school, there was a girl in my grade who told all her friends she didn't like me because I was “too happy all the time”. When this information eventually made its way back to me I was puzzled for a couple of reasons, the first one being that I didn’t know her very well at all — we had two classes together over the four years we were in school together, and we had no mutual friends. The second is that I didn't perceive myself as “happy all the time”. As much as I didn't want to care about her opinion of me, I did. I spent days thinking about her words; why would anyone decide not to like someone for being “too happy”? What does being “too happy” mean, and what information did she have that made her come to this conclusion about me?
After a few weeks of dwelling on it, I let it go.
It wasn't until my second year of university that I thought about this event in detail again, and I began to answer my own questions. My social media personality was the culprit. I realized that I had fallen into a trap of only sharing an extremely curated and unrealistic version of what my life looked like, and to an unassuming eye, I was “too happy”. The pictures on Instagram were not reflective of the events actually unfolding in my life offline. Even if my social media presence wasn’t what inspired her to draw this conclusion about my identity, what this girl said caused me to reflect on the fact that I was inadvertently causing the people engaging with me on social media to hold themselves to the same standard of happiness I was appearing to possess.
To put it bluntly, social media sucks.
We only share the parts of our lives we want to be highlighted. (I know what I’m sharing here isn’t news, but it’s a reminder we need sometimes). Every single one of us has bad days, and sometimes the bad ones outnumber the good ones. The bad days aren't represented in our Instagram feeds, and that’s one of the things that is wrong with mass social media usage.
Although I have spent the last two years attempting to mend my unhealthy relationship with my social media usage, I can still confidently say that I don’t want the people that follow me to know which days I’ve spent so anxious that I’ve chewed the inside of my mouth until it’s bloody, or been so overwhelmed that I can’t catch my breath or see through my tears, but I have to stop and ask myself — why? I guess because I am scared of the judgment that comes with experiencing the same emotions every single human being has faced. I’m not at a place where I’m ready to share those emotions with that many people yet, but I’m working towards it because these emotions are normal, and only sharing the good days reinforces the stigma surrounding the bad days.
How many times have you caught yourself comparing your happiness to the people on your feed? No one is as happy as they appear online, even you. It’s comforting to remember that even the people that look like they’ve got it all together really don’t. No one does, and we need to stop making it seem that way.
We are all human. We all experience emotion. We have to keep that in mind when we are looking at someone’s Instagram profile. It seems so polished because it is – an Instagram profile is not representative of someone’s entire life.
At the end of the day, it’s all so vain. It’s just social media, it’s not that serious. Try your best to see it for what it is.
Graphic By: Rida Chaudhry