Laurel Snyder

 

I’ve been thinking so much lately about how my own awareness of social media affects the way I actually experience the world…

Many years ago, in the early days of Twitter (but before I had a smart phone), there was a day when the site went down. As a result, I turned off my laptop, and resurfaced for the first time from being deeply submerged in online community. I remember that I took my kids to the park that afternoon, and I sat there on a bench, feeling disconnected, and aware that I was “thinking Tweets” I couldn’t send. 

It was the first time I’d ever considered how my urge to “share” my thoughts was meaningfully affecting the development of the thoughts themselves. For the very first time, I became hyper aware that my thoughts were no longer just for me. Rather, I was curating and editing as I went. And not just my thoughts, but my activities, surroundings, life choices. 

I’ve wrestled ever since with how much my awareness of the online world affects my interior life. Periodically, I deactivate my accounts, and “reset” for a bit, but I always come back. I’m a deeply social creature, for better or worse. I struggle with this balance, and often teeter-totter back and forth. Even though I know I’m my healthiest/happiest self when I’m less online. 

But I bring the subject up today because I’ve become intensely aware of how social media (and the specific community here) is affecting not just what I choose to say online, but how I feel inside myself, as I consider recent world events. There are words I have been willing to use, and words I have not been willing to use, for fear of causing my friends and family members pain. There have been spaces I’ve been willing to occupy, and spaces I haven’t been. That’s not something I’m especially ashamed of (though I might feel differently if I thought I had any real power to meaningfully affect policy), but I do worry about how those choices have affected how I THINK about recent events. I don’t like that idea at all. 

What, I wonder, have I not allowed myself to think or feel, because my thoughts and feelings are so often tied up with what I’m likely to say/share/post about those thoughts and feelings later? 

And you? What, I wonder, might you do differently, if you knew nobody would ever hear about it, or see it? How might you process the world differently, if you felt your thoughts belonged to you, alone? Are there things you think on the inside, but don’t share? Are you aware of individuals in your feed who particularly alter what you present to “the world?” Are there things you post to one SM platform, but not another, because your communities in those spaces vary? Do you ever post at night, and then immediately make it private, because you know that by morning, you may come to regret your words? Do you lie? Or maybe adjust the story a little, tilt the camera or crop a photo, so that the online image is the best possible depiction of your actual life? 

I do! I try not to, but of course I do. I take 20 selfies to get one I want to post. I angle my ring light during Zooms, so that nobody can see the collection of dirty coffee cups on my desk. And those things are minor, of course, but then I wonder whether that doesn’t take an eventual toll– both the curation, and the need to reconcile the fact of it with my sense of what’s more true. The dissonance between the truth and the near-truth. The effort involved. 

As a writer, I LOVE sharing my thoughts and feelings with an audience. This kind of sharing has been my life, more or less– my work, as well as the basis for most of my relationships.–since about age nine. But I don’t like feeling like I OWE anyone my thoughts and feelings. I don’t like feeling as though the sharing is keeping me from arriving at my own assessments, or living my most honest life on the inside. I don’t like feeling like I can’t disappear and keep my thoughts to myself, when I crave that. 

So I guess I just want to remind folks (and myself) that we are all on our own individual journeys. That thinking takes time. That you’re allowed to change your mind about things. You’re allowed to disagree with people you love, and you’re allowed to do it quietly. You’re allowed to stay silent until you feel ready to speak. Often, lately, we are called upon to speak up before we have even had time to gather any information. We are asked to act before we even know what that might entail. 

I’ve worked hard, these last two months, to read and listen and process with people I trust. I’ve leaned heavily on some of you, and I’m grateful. I’ve learned a lot, but not nearly enough. I’ve also tried to start some conversations, and found that they have ALL moved immediately to private messages, and flourished there, though they couldn’t seem to exist in the glaring light of a public platform. There’s been a lesson in that, for me. 

Happy Hanukkah to all of you. Here is a little bit of light, from my home to yours. Though of course this is only one portrait of the light, one angle, one moment. You’ll never know what got cropped from this shot, what happened before or after it was taken, what we were discussing in that moment…

Every story is incomplete.