Instagram

 

I recently took two of my older children on holiday for a post-exam city break to Palma de Majorca.  It was hot, there was a pool overlooking the harbour.  We spent quality time together without their younger siblings.  We explored the city, ate tapas, swam in the sea.  How lucky we are.  Equally, the hotel we stayed in was crap and under-staffed, water poured through our bathroom ceiling at one point and we had to change rooms.  It was two miles out of the city with very little in the way of entertainment close by.  Everything was twice the price that we would have expected.  Evening meals did not come in at under a hundred euros. We all shared a room and I discovered that both my children snore.  In some kind of fiendish plan, if I got one of them to turn over and thus cease, the other would then start up.  I was permanently exhausted.  Then there were the arguments about how we would spend the day, with my son always up for some kind of expedition and my daughter wanting to drink (expensive) cocktails by the pool all day.  And then our flight was delayed by 24 hours necessitating and extra night's accommodation and a lot of plans rearranging.

My instagram feed was, perhaps inevitably, full of pictures of the bluest skies and seas, myself from a strategic angle in a bikini, delicious food and beach vistas.  This is how my Instagram feed looks.  I saw this quote above today and I thought, 'well, of course!' Does anybody not realise this? But it seems that some people consider only posting the best bits to be inauthentic.  I take issue with this.  There are plenty of accounts that you can follow if you want to zoom in on misery and I think that's fine.  Make this space what you want it to be.  For me, Instagram is scrap-booking.  It has an almost entirely aesthetic value for me and these are the sorts of accounts that I follow.  I will hold my hand up and say that I quite wittingly cherry-pick the best bits and post those.  Sometimes, the weeks are full of nothing but shit and then there is some beautiful light filtering through the trees and I capture it and share it and cling onto it.  I do this because it makes me feel better, in the moment and when I look back.  It seems like the moments of quiet loneliness, where things go wrong and we wonder why we bother, and getting up and functioning is hard; these moments look after themselves just fine. But if we're not careful, in a landscape of constantly negative and frightening newsfeed, the precious moments might just get lost in the noise.  That isn't to say that I am advocating suppressing sadness or gaslighting our own travails.  Rather, take it to counselling.

If this sounds like an environment of fakery, I would argue that the connections I make on Instagram, although physically distant, are incredibly energising and, yes, real, to me.  You really can bond over a mutual appreciation of beauty, with people outside of your four walls, your town or your country.  What moves somebody speaks volumes about their inner life and values.  I will never trivialise the significance of a new dress or cushion because these are the things that distract us with their colour, they allow us an outlet of creativity in a largely uncreative world.  And it is the colour that I am seeking on Instagram.  I follow relatively few blue tick accounts because they are often not curated by the account-holders themselves, and I follow even fewer accounts set up to promulgate a single cause.  I have long since done away with Twitter and Facebook because of their bear pit environments but the little squares of people's precious moments helps me to feel connected to a bigger world than my immediate environment.

When I look back at my holiday pictures, courtesy of Instagram, where maybe I've cropped out an unsightly building or lightened the exposure so that our expressions are more visible, I am reminded of the ornate architecture that I may never see again, the heat on my skin, the aftermath of a joke, how nice my new dress felt to wear.  If Instagram didn't come along when it did, I would've continued to make scrap books and albums, the only difference now is that more people get to see my pictures (lucky souls).  Someone from my hometown, I discover, has just visited the tiny town on the north coast of Majorca that my son and I travelled to by train.  These tentacles of appreciation and connection are new but shouldn't be viewed suspiciously.  Let us at least allow that the digital age has some good in it.