real eyes realise real lies

Every once in a while I have a bit of an identity crisis. I go online and see a cool friend of a friend on Instagram who now goes to Barnard and is living the life in Manhattan with nice pictures of herself and her equally cool friend group, or someone with 100k followers just for being really hot and having really amazing fashion sense, or Damon and Jo, a YouTube duo who travel all the time and speak like 5 languages and are best friends, or just the endless stream of twentysomethings giving apartment tour vlogs. I look at other people's lives and think about what I could be doing and/or what I will be doing in the future and feel a mix of excitement and fear and anxiety and shame. My current life never matches up to what I want to be doing.

A lot of that has to do with social media because things always look a lot cooler in (carefully curated photos) than they actually are. With older people writing thinkpieces about how social media is ruining everything, the younger generation tends to fight back and highlight all the good ways that social media has impacted our lives; the Internet isn't evil, it's just another step in communication, in the same way that the printing press revolutionised information. So we get tired of people preaching about the dangers of social media, but we actually do need to keep in mind that the posts people make –– especially famous people with a ton of followers who make money off of social media –– have taken hours and are meant to fit a specific persona. I read something the other day about how, inevitably, we have different facets of ourselves that we present to different people: we're different when we're with our friends compared to our parents, our colleagues, our teachers, etc. We're also different people with different friends. But on social media, all that is collapsed into one. You have to entertain everyone you know at once, and that can be really exhausting.

So I just need to keep in mind that social media isn't everything, and slowly trying to turn myself off from that –– because I do admit that I'm a bit addicted to the Internet. I no longer use Snapchat, although I keep the app for occasional messages from a couple of people. Woohoo! Thank you, new Snapchat update, for turning me off. Also, thank God I never got into Snapchat streaks, because those are completely meaningless, but obviously it feels like an achievement when you get high numbers. I only keep Facebook for magazine and school stuff, and Tumblr is also down to a minimum, especially as I only access it on the computer. I'm trying really hard to cut down on my Instagram usage, although that's now my primary social media, so forcing myself to stop using Explore. It helps that something that was really important in my final year of high school was that I finally realised that I didn't need to invest my time and energy into people that I didn't really care about, or know that well, or particularly genuinely like. I didn't hate my classmates, but I also had almost no interest in their lives –– which is perfectly okay. Especially since I'd known them for years already. Having a handful of really close friends is so much better than trying to please a bunch of people you only kind of know. So that meant that I spent less time looking at other people's stuff on social media –– my real problem is memes and random posts.

Instead of scrolling on Facebook during idle times like waiting for the bus, etc., I try to read a book –– although this is much easier said than done. It's much harder to just immerse yourself in a book for 4 minutes beacuse you really need to get back into it, whereas social media was designed to feed you little bite-sized pieces of information or entertainment and to keep you hooked.

Because that's the most important thing I've been learning: not to feel overwhelmed by guilt whenever you do something you shouldn't. Instead of feeling bad about having spent an hour on Facebook, just go and do the other thing. Wallowing is an even bigger waste of time. Being aware that everyone has these issues with the Internet and with procrastination means that I won't feel like the biggest loser in the world whenever I succumb to it, and it also makes me feel better about trying to be better. Again, social media was designed to make you addicted, so it's good to break that.

These days I like to remind myself that, although I have a ton of insecurities about every aspect of my life, and constantly berate myself for not being better and doing more, I actually have a very good exterior image. People tend to see me as someone who is really put-together and organised, and who does a lot of things. If I am never satisfied with where I am at the moment and am constantly envisioning a better alternate life for myself where, for instance, everything is the same but I'm a world-famous blogger, I'll never enjoy my life. Because even if I achieve all my dreams, I'll probably still think I could do more. I need to take things slow and realise that I actually already have a lot on my plate, and I'm only 18. I have my whole life ahead of me and I can do so many things in it.

And a final thing that I've started to come to terms with is that –– surprise –– I can literally do whatever I want. I used to, and still do, get all worked up about what I should and shouldn't be doing, for instance getting FOMO about going out clubbing, in part because I have all these expectations about what I should be doing for the "university/young person experience". But observing others, like this one 23-year-old girl in my course who is married and financially independent and covered in cool tattoos and loves cats, has made me realise that I actually can just be who I am and do whatever I like.

So I'm going to continue trying to take things one at a time and enjoy every moment, because even though I'm currently dying to go out into the real world and have my own apartment and decorate it myself, I'm sure that 10 years down the line I'll really miss my undergrad years when I was totally carefree.

bad poems #8

why do i constantly live in the future: a series of haikus

I

a small apartment,

city not too small or large,

full of books and light

II

a cat or a dog

or a rabbit or a bird

some shostakovich

III

i'll buy everything

i need, paying attention

to colanders and

IV

first aid kits, linen

and dustpan and the kettle,

a drawer for socks.

V

i don't ask for much

just time to have a pot of

yoghurt with granola

VI

breakfasts and netflix

and trips to the museum

and my phd

VII

feet up on the sofa

taking notes from my reading

fresh air from windows

VIII

cooking my mom's food

calling her to ask about

boiling lotus root

IX

mismatched furniture

wall with gallery postcards

a candle burning

X

i'll need some money

to cover the rent and to

fund my big road trip

XI

that doesn't matter

another instagram life
for my best daydreams.

things i like #9

- when wind blows across fresh, untouched snow and the top layer of powder gets blown away. the wind acquires a white color, and it looks like the whisper of ghosts.
- the smell of jasmine
- spotify discover
- sweet potato fries
- being in love