the version of me i put online

I never wanted to be someone who was on social media, to be honest. It was never part of my plan to have thousands of people knowing my life, my thoughts, and who I am as a person. But for the last year and a half, my life has been on social media. Not all of it, but enough of it.

I struggled a lot with who I was on social media. Sometimes I felt like I was genuinely portraying myself, and other times it felt like I was faking all of it. But either way, people were going to interpret my behavior however they wanted and come to their own conclusions about who I was. I won't lie. I was impulsive at times. I think when you're constantly on social media, you can start to lose sight of where certain boundaries are supposed to exist. As someone who never really saw the point in keeping things private, I didn't always understand why I should hide certain parts of my life from people. My mindset was always that if people wanted to judge me based on what I chose to show them, then they could.

I don't really think that way anymore. Honestly, there are things I wish I had kept private. There are things I wish I had handled differently. I've learned that I don't have to explain myself every single time someone misunderstands me. I don't have to tell my side of every story. I don't have to prove that my experience was real just because someone else might interpret it differently. And strangely enough, I've found a lot of peace in that.

Sometimes I wish I had been born into a generation without social media. I can acknowledge everything it has given us. It has created communities, opportunities, careers, friendships, and entire parts of life that probably wouldn't have existed otherwise. But I also think we've underestimated how much damage it can do to the way we see ourselves and each other. We spend so much time comparing ourselves to people online that we forget we're usually comparing our real life to someone else's edited version of theirs.

I remember people telling me they wished they had my skin or that they wished they were as thin as me. Meanwhile, my skin was something I had struggled with for years. There were things about my appearance that I was insecure about that nobody online ever saw. People were comparing themselves to a version of me that existed through a screen, without knowing what it actually felt like to be me. And it wasn't just appearance. Sometimes people would tell me they hoped I stayed that happy when I was on live, and I would wonder if they could ever tell that I had been crying right before I turned the camera on.

The amount of times I've cried before or after livestreaming probably couldn't be counted on both hands. There were times I was going through some of the darkest periods of my life and still went online smiling, laughing, talking, and acting like everything was fine. There were times that someone had just broken my heart and I had to act like there was nothing wrong. There were times that I genuinely didn't even want to be alive anymore. That's the part people don't see. Just because you see something doesn't make it true. A camera only shows so much of the room.

For a while, I felt trapped between wanting to be honest online and realizing that being honest doesn't mean showing everything. If I was always happy, I worried people would compare themselves to me and think my life was perfect. If I was sad, people wanted to know why. They wanted the story, the details, the explanation. And eventually I started questioning how much of my life was actually mine to share.

Because most situations don't only involve you. There are other people attached to your experiences. So where is the line between telling your own story and exposing someone else's? When does sharing your perspective become an attack? When does explaining what happened to you become disrespectful to the person who was also there? I don't think I have a perfect answer to that, but I do know now that not everything needs to be public just because it happened to me.

Social media can make you feel like you're constantly performing a version of yourself. You're supposed to look happy, but not too happy. Vulnerable, but not too vulnerable. Successful, but relatable. Attractive, but effortlessly so. Struggling, but still inspirational. And somehow we're all supposed to know what the standard is. The problem is that the standard is constantly changing. We spend so much time trying to fit into an image that doesn't even stay the same long enough for us to understand what we're supposed to be.

That's why I think social media can be a trap. I've been on both sides of it. I've been the person looking at someone online and thinking they had everything together, and I've been the person other people looked at and assumed had everything together. And both sides were wrong.

Social media is fake, not necessarily because everyone is intentionally lying, but because a screen can never show you the entire truth. Someone you think is a perfect angel because of everything they do publicly might have completely different parts of themselves that you never see. Someone who is always smiling on live might have spent the hour before crying. Someone who seems like they have the perfect life might be struggling to get through their own. And someone you think you know because you've watched them for months might still be someone you know almost nothing about.

I think that's what I've learned most from being on the other side of the screen. Don't compare your life to someone else's highlight reel. Don't assume someone's happiness means they don't hurt. Don't assume someone's silence means they're okay. And don't assume that because someone showed you a part of themselves, you've been shown all of them.

All I can say from someone who has met plenty of people who are on social media is that a person's image is not who a person is.

We are all so much bigger than what we post. Sometimes the most honest version of yourself is the part nobody gets to see.