For a long time I've been trying to figure out how to come back to this blog. How do this in an authentic way, whatever that means. How do I learn in public? How do I show myself, my students, and my peers that it is okay to be incomplete? To be a work in progress.
In a world where everyone is a personal brand (us millennials are particularly bad about for this), how do you show up in a way that is vulnerable online? How do you show up unsure of yourself? Unsure of your unfinished (and potentially bad) ideas?
Also, in case Gen Z thinks they are getting off the hook here, switch personal brand with my aesthetic and you have essentially the same thing. Although, I will say, your generation is better at trying out identities and leaving behind what doesn't fit.
You can't really do that as a brand. You will never hear Nike say that their latest shoe is a work in progress, or their latest environmental initiative may not be all they could be doing and they are open to doing better. Brands largely don't change. If they do, it's not because it will make them better, it's because it will make them more money. When they do change , its because it will make them better and more money. They don't like to admit they are wrong. Apple has always been Apple. Coke-a-cola has always been Coke-a-cola. All without transformative shifts in identity.
I don't think people work like that. Or at least I don't work that way. The person I was pre-deep-COVID is just an echo of the person I am now and person I was in the early 2010s was an echo of that person. I've shifted, changed, gone forward, gone backward, made some good decisions, and made bad ones. I've asked permission of those I love to love me as I change and aimed to the type of person that loves them when they do.
The people I love are not fixed in time. They are not a brand, and I don't expect them to be. I want to see them love themselves more deeply and flourish in their life. Some of them have figured out how to do this (it won't likely work for them forever, so their time of change will come again) while others are still in moments of experimentation and in the midst of change.
I want to them to have the freedom to change regardless if it will match their current "brand" or not. Even if the change doesn't stick, I want them to be able to try.
I worry we are losing our self in the highlight reel. That instead of connecting us, our feeds leave us with this false perception that everyone is doing just fine. That everyone has it together all the time. And we are the ones who don't. That we are behind. That we don't have that magical it.
In the content firehouse of social media, we don't even notice if someone misses a few weeks of posting as they scramble to put the pieces of their life together after a break-up or the death of a loved one.
I used to think the keeping up with Jones' and lawn wars of the older generations was this insanely wasteful performance they were all pretending to believe in. The sports car in the drive way. Perfect grass in the middle of a heatwave. The perfect dinner party. All of it for the perception of those things rather than the experience of those things. The need to be seen in a particular way.
That need hasn't left in our younger generations, it's morphed. To Instagram stories, to LinkedIn achievement posts, to #hustleculture , #monkmode, and #girlboss . A digital performance not unlike our parent's manicured front lawns in the middle of a climate crisis. I know too many people depressed and alone posting #blessed for no one in particular.
For me? I think in the time since I last consistently posted I've had at least two breakdowns I can remember. None of them made into my Instagram story. One was happening as I was posting some my best pictures from my first trip to Japan as I dealt with one the worst bout of Illness Anxiety Disorder I've ever had.
In that week of radio silence, I think I may have slept six hours total? I cried endlessly before the Zoloft and therapy started to work.
Do we all need bond over (lowercase “t”) traumatic experiences in order to be authentic online? Definitely not. Would we be a little better off if we knew that the perfect bodies, lives, and careers of those we follow are a projection, a fiction that we are agreeing to believe is reality? Probably.
Would those moments of breakthroughs and joy be that much sweeter if we knew what it took to get there? Definitely.