Me, Myselfie, and I

April 4th 2017

The social media persona is something that I have been wanting to write about for the longest time, but I have been putting it off until I could find the words to explain it in a way that (hopefully) wouldn’t be taken the wrong way.

Alright, so let’s start out by what I mean when I say “social media persona”. Your social media persona is the person you are when you are online. For many people, this is just their regular, everyday persona just on a digital platform which I find to be refreshing and wonderful and not what I am talking about when I refer to “social media personas”. For other people (the one’s I’ll be discussing in this post), this is an aspirational persona in which the person online has similar traits and interests to you, but is not who you truly are.

We live in a world where it is incredibly hard to stand out by “just being yourself” so this isn’t some bash post about people who exaggerate their personalities online. Most of us do it to some extent so I am not here to completely shame the practice. I’m sort of just trying to urge people to think a bit differently about the whole thing.

My social media persona used to be way stronger and finely tuned than it is now and it took some work for me to tone it down a bit. I feel like, at this current point in time, my social media is the realest it has ever been and all I did was make some pretty small changes:

1. I only post about being happy when I am genuinely happy- I know this sounds ridiculous, but from knowing people in real life, you see so often that people talk about how great their life is on social media when they are absolutely miserable. I’m not saying be miserable, but don’t plaster a fake smile on the internet to make your life look desirable. If it cheers you up then go for it, but don’t just post happy to look happy from the outside.
2. I put the value of the memories over the quality of the image- I still and probably always will post posed images. However, I try to remember that I post to preserve memories and not solely for aesthetic. If I had a fun day with friends and the picture doesn’t look perfect, but makes me happy, I’ll post it anyway because years later I would rather see that than a “perfect” photo.
3. I don’t post things I don’t like- I don’t post about books I have no intention of reading. I don’t say I love albums I haven’t listened to. I don’t take artsy food pics of food I don’t even like. I don’t pretend to like things for aesthetic. You want people to know and appreciate you? Share things you love, not things that you think will make you look deep or trendy.

I know this all sounds so simple, but it is actually way harder than it seems. It’s so hard to choose between authenticity and aesthetic, but you CAN have both! If you post things that are true and genuine to you then your ideal “aesthetic” will create itself because it’ll be a beautiful collection of things that make up you as a person…

…and that is beautiful~

Jess