100 Days of Happiness V2.0

I dislike social media.

I would leave it all behind if it weren’t for my Facebook groups, where much of my non-experimental learning and sense of community comes from.

Instagram is a different beast all together. I miss the (very long ago) days when Instagram was a collection of beautiful photographs, and you could learn so much about a person, and the way they saw the world, from a photo. Not what they were trying to portray, just their world, through their eyes. That changed around the time when digital cameras turned themselves to selfie mode, and as a culture we encouraged each other to become obsessed with projecting a version of ourselves publicly, for consumption by others.

There is a line in one of my favorite poems, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, that reads:

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;”

And life through a social media lens often reminds me of that.

When the Aylmer Bulletin interviewed me before the holidays, they asked deep questions that brought to light for me the importance I still place on ‘safe spaces’ on the web. Not safe from the perspective of my data, or personal information. I accept we passed the point of no return on privacy, and the concept of ‘private personal information’ now rests alongside forming fossil bones in an overflowing landfill somewhere.

I mean ‘safe spaces’ as in spaces where I can interact with others and be myself, and where I can trust the people I am interacting with are being a true version of themselves.

That is my ‘social media’, and if you find me in a private group, I am either quietly observing and learning, or comfortable enough to use my written voice, and that is me.

I enjoy the private side of Facebook, and I only realized that when my older children began learning about their digital footprint at school, and asked me to stop posting photos of them online. I did, and I went a step further, and removed acquaintances and people I haven’t seen for decades from my ‘friends’ list, and stopped posting anything personal, with 2 exceptions.

My most recent one was a ‘coming out’ of sorts, almost a year ago, where I shared the blog post I wrote about dealing with my irreversible neurological condition.

The second one was a mother-daughter photo project titled 100 days of happiness, where my now 16 (then 12) year old daughter and I committed to 100 days of taking and posting photos we took of things that made us happy in a day, for 100 days, as a little help to get through winter, on Instagram.

The project ended in a bit of a disaster for my daughter, as her instagram account was hacked, she lost control of it, and all her photos were deleted, somewhere around day 76. We cried together at her loss, the privacy breech, and the tainting of our project, but she learned important lessons as a result, and I decided to complete the project for both of us.

Today, I scrolled through Instagram mindlessly (doom scrolling, as C calls it), for the first time since the holidays, and I found myself feeling anxious, with an artificially manufactured sense of comparison I am not living up to. In my world the example is feeling as though I’m too far behind in winter sowing my native plant seeds, that I should have started earlier, that I should have planned to plant more species, that I should have published my list of plants I expect to have available on my website already, that my list should be tri-lingual,  alphabetized and coded with beautiful hand drawn symbols and handwritten cursive notes in the margins, photographed on a gigantic butcher block with the glow of our airtight wood stove barely (but definitely) visible in the far left background, stockings still hanging,  etc, etc, etc.

I may be exaggerating slightly, but that feeling shook me, and started bubbling through my insides before I could recognize what was happening to me. I found myself sitting in my car waiting for my son to finish his first ever job interview tonight, and I started writing, steam of consciousness run-on sentence style, as I can only do now, and this is how this post came to be.

That feeling of comparison, of not-enoughingess, of perceived inferiority, and failure, is manufactured by an algorithm I don’t care to understand. It’s enough for me to take a slow, purposeful breath and think about the reason for these sudden feelings to recognize what caused them. It feels like an itch from a tiny fish bone stuck in the back of my throat, with no glass of water close nearby.

I asked my (now 16) year old, who hasn’t posted anything permanent on her Instagram since she was 12, if she would like to try 100 Days of Happiness together again. She surprised me and said yes (with the caveat that posting it to her account would be embarrassing, and she is only willing to do it through an anonymous account).

So we begin. Tomorrow, officially, me and my oldest daughter, through her secret account, 100 days, 100 photos of something about each day that made us happy, with no whitty commentary or pressure to explain the context of our photos, or our reason for choosing them.

If you like the idea and you ever want to try it, I would love to see your photos, and a glimpse of your real world through your eyes each day too. Or don’t, and enjoy mine. If you find my daughter’s anonymous account enjoy hers too, though I promised I won’t link to her. 

Tonight is Day 0, and probably the only time you will see an explanation for a photo, and only here, hidden within the words of my blog that I know only a fraction of people who ‘like” my photos read. So for you, dear reader, Day 0 is the last evening of winter break with my family, and this is a photo taken during our first ever family ‘lets make sushi from scratch’ night.

In the spirit of the next 3.3 months of my Instagram feed, I’ve kept this blog post to one photo.

Happy New Year!