“The reason why we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”
-Unknown
I’ve always struggled with the comparison game. Soccer used to be my competitive outlet. Once that was gone, I had to find something to silence my inner craving to compete. Unfortunately that something for me was social media. Instagram especially.
I was late in the game when it came to social media. I didn’t go through the AIM chatroom phase or the MySpace phase. I was in the later part of my sophomore year of high school when I was allowed to have my first form of social media–Facebook. And I posted ALL THE TIME. I look back at the cringey “on this day” notifications I get and OOF. I took selfies all the time…with my digital camera. I posted things like “Spanish project DONE!!!!!!! amen, now time to watch some pigskin 😀 ❤ Football” (true post from 8 years ago today). I didn’t really care what other people thought about my posts. I posted what I wanted, when I wanted, just because I felt like it.
I didn’t get my first smartphone until I was 18. That’s when I discovered Instagram. My camera quality has never been the best (even today, due to my cute little iPhone SE–which if you do not know came out after the iPhone 5 but before the iPhone 6 so yes it’s tiny and old). Nonetheless I was posting like 3-4 pictures on Instagram a day. I had a problem. And it would be silly things, like my penguin lunchbox or my soccer cleats that I colored/designed with Sharpies. Around the time I took Senior Pictures, I started posting pics from that shoot and noticing how much attention they got comparably. That’s when the competitive side of me came out. I started strategizing how I could get more likes. This was a dangerous mindset to adopt right before college. However, I felt that college opened up so many opportunities to take awesome pictures of even better memories.
I was always that friend that insisted on taking pictures at every event and hangout (which I now feel silly doing because of how much everyone pretended to be bothered by it). There’s just something so magical about entrapping a memory–a space in time–and looking back on it at any point later in life, just to be transported right to that exact moment. Because I loved my friends so much, I would of course post these pictures to Instagram. After a while it went from innocently capturing memories to wanting people to see how much fun I was having in college (which I really was). Summers, however, turned into another competition because my summers were very uneventful. I was surrounded by people on social media taking trips, going to concerts, and hanging out with all their hometown friends. I did none of that. And the competitive side of me started to get angry…and then sad. I started comparing nonstop.
*Why does she look so pretty all the time?
*Why do they get to go to all of these amazing places while I’m stuck here?
*How can they afford that *insert materialistic possession here*?
It became less of sharing fun moments in time and much more of trying to be the best…for other people’s approval. People I didn’t really care about as much as I was portraying. This is something I still battle today, years later. It was really hard after college because you lose all of those awesome campus events and friends that are just down the hall. It made me feel very lonely and very unsuccessful in life. I would look at my other recent-grad classmates and see that they bought a house or got engaged or got their dream job and then look at my life like…well…I’ve gone through a major career change, I live paycheck to paycheck, and the close friends I had in college have all faded and only talk to me when I reach out first. Then I am sent in a spiral of negative thoughts produced from constant comparison.
But just like the quote up top says, what people post is what they choose to show to the world; it’s their highlight reel. They could be going through the exact same things, or even worse, but their content that they choose to post could be hiding that. I try to remind myself not to compare what I see with what I am struggling through day-to-day. I step back and start counting my blessings. I remind myself that comparing is not a healthy way to bring my competitive side out.
It is a hard process, but it is one of the main reasons I am so excited to begin my journey into the beauty industry. The message of perfection that society forces on us through social media is so toxic, and I’ve only dealt with it for a handful of years. I could not IMAGINE girls that are growing up today with societal pressures in their face since birth. While that soap-box conversation may be a blog post for another time, I just want to say how excited I am to hopefully help young girls see that you don’t have to be cake-faced and Photo-shopped in order to be beautiful. You don’t have to look like the girls with millions of followers to be accepted. And as hard as that is to realize sometimes, it is such an important mindset.
Life According To Jazz 