How Can We Honor the Blergh?

In this post, I share frustrations about inauthenticity and lack of connection on social media. Picture: Cory and me after our second frozen embryo transfer (FET) this past February. I didn’t share with many people or on our blog that we were pregnant for 8 weeks until I miscarried. Sharing now as an attempt to cast a line of authenticity and realness.

I’ve slid into my semi-annual social media funk.

A couple times a year, I wake up from a mental fog and realize how much I dislike social media. How much it feeds my dissatisfaction with life, fuels my comparison mentality, and heightens my overall feelings of blergh.

The specific impetuses (was really hoping that the plural for impetus was impeti, but alas, no luck) for these social media wake-up calls vary. Sometimes it’s body-image related. Often it’s a desire to be more present and mindful. Other times it’s because I want to protect my privacy. Sometimes it’s because I want to “stick it to the man” and step out of capitalism.

And so every so often, I pledge to close my social media accounts…or at the very least to spend less logging on.

The particular reason for my current funk seems to have stemmed from how imbalanced and inauthentic social media feels. 99% of the content I consume is skewed to the positive aspects of life. Weddings and birth announcements and vacations and dinners out with friends and back-to-school happiness and smiles and smiles and smiles and smiles and smiles and smiles.

And not only do I consume others’ positive…I typically only share my positive. I almost feel ashamed as I reflect back on my most recent Instagram posts:

My son and his friend smiling during a playdate.
Me smiling while holding a margarita in California.
My mom, sisters, and I taking a selfie on a beach.
My son, calmly and reflectively holding a spaghetti squash from our garden.
A family selfie to celebrate our son getting his second COVID19 vaccine.

I typically only share the positive AND I’m acutely aware of how this only represents a fraction of my reality. It almost makes me sick to think about how I am only adding to the inauthenticity of it all. Fueling the disconnection from reality and from each other.

I feel ashamed because by sharing only the positive aspects of my life, I am painting a false picture of my experience. My life is certainly not just smiles and margaritas and beaches. That alongside my happy is my sad. And more often than not, my happy and my sad are happening simultaneously.

I haven’t been honoring the fact that life is complicated. A messy mix of the high and low, joy and sorrow, light and dark, the yay and the blergh…all at the same time, at any given moment. That’s what makes life so rich and what makes the human experience so unique. That we can and do hold multiple experiences inside us at once.

But on social media, I typically only share one dimension of my experience, and I typically only consume one dimension of yours.

And that…that makes me feel even more blergh.

My understanding of and distaste for this has only intensified recently after reading Susan Cain’s book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.

Cain writes, "“If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it—rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other. We could remember that no matter how distasteful we might find someone’s opinions, no matter how radiant, or fierce, someone may appear, they have suffered, or they will.”

She continues, “We’re living, famously, through a time in which we have trouble connecting with others, especially outside our “tribes.” And Keltner’s work shows us that sadness—Sadness, of all things!—has the power to create the “union between souls” that we so desperately lack.”

So what is holding me back from sharing my whole world on social media even though I share my whole world with people in real life (for the most part)? A big part of it is that no one else is sharing those things. I don’t want to be the only one sharing the blergh even though I know that by sharing my blergh, I’m making space for you to share yours too. And sharing the blergh takes vulnerability…and it doesn’t feel safe being vulnerable when it’s not reciprocated. And wouldn’t you agree that society has painted those who share their woes as attention-seeking? It could just be me…but does anyone else feel this too?

I just want to be real and foster authentic connection in a world of faking it and separation…because sharing and consuming only smiles is slowly killing me, making me feel broken as I try to navigate my complex world…making me feel isolated and alone and disconnected.

It’s a vicious cycle. I turn to social media to feel less alone…to seek connection and community. But then being ON social media ends up making me feel more alone and more separate. So then I take extended breaks from social media. But then being OFF of social media feels lonely too. So I inevitably feel the pull back to the screen.

I sit here now and wonder what I need to move forward. Solutions? Pledges to be more authentic on social media?

I don’t think I need an answer. Just naming my experience feels like a good first step.

Anyone else feel this too?