Edit desk: A snapshot of a life

As I walked out of my first press night for The Brown and White as a section editor, it dawned on me that maybe I wasn’t cut out for the job. I started to go over every second, every minute and every dreadful hour of that first press night, carefully analyzing all my flaws and the little mistakes I had made over the course of nine hours. I declared myself a failure and left it at that, never stopping to consider the alternative.

A couple of days later, I ran into one of the other editors, and she told me how great of a job I had done that first press night. I heard as she told me how insightful my questions had been and how well I fit the position. This sort of compliment wasn’t given to me just once, but multiple times. People saw me one way when I was convinced that I was the opposite. Why was I being so hard on myself if others thought I was doing a good job? 

We are always harder on ourselves than we need to be. At least, I know I am. In part, it’s hard to properly analyze any aspect of ourselves since we don’t see it from an outside perspective. But the way others see us sometimes isn’t the best quantifier either.

In reality, others see us only in the ways we present ourselves to the world. But even more than that, we see people through a morphed lens that they inadvertently create themselves. We see only what they show us and get glimpses at their life through social media and our daily interactions.

But that’s what they are — merely glimpses into a life that doesn’t stop after the camera is turned off or the interaction is over.

Only the best parts of someone’s life make it on to social media. Maybe seeing all the good aspects of a person’s life and not seeing all the negative ones forces us to have a skewed perception of what our own life should look like. Since we experience both the good and the bad in our own lives, we might be harsher on ourselves in the end because our reality doesn’t look like the life other people are living. Or, at least, the one we think they’re living.

I think a lot of personal insecurity stems from those snapshots of reality people post online. I’ll be the first to admit that I love posting cool, happy pictures of myself and hoping that people like them. But even when I post only happy things, I sometimes fail to internalize that’s what others are doing as well.

Sometimes when looking at other people’s posts, I wonder how their life can be so perfect and seemingly cool. I have to actually remind myself that a picture is only a millisecond of a day — simply a snapshot of a fleeting moment. It does not paint a complete portrait of that person’s life.

We don’t see when someone is up at 4 a.m. because they didn’t do homework all weekend. All we saw were the weekend adventures perfectly captured, filtered and posted.

We don’t see when someone’s life is falling apart, because the trend is to portray the best parts of ourselves and hide all the struggle, insecurity and loneliness that actually makes us human. We do this in real life, too.

At that first press night I tried to appear like I knew what I was doing. I tried really hard to make it seem like I was confident in my abilities, but I was terrified that I wasn’t living up to the expectations. I obsessed over whether or not I had done a good job. And this is where reality mirrors social media. In real life we still try to be something we are not. We might do it with good intentions, but people still don’t see your full life, they see the curated bits and pieces of a facade we put on to look the way we want to look.

There’s nothing wrong with social media. Like I said, I’m the first person who gets excited when one of my Instagram photos gets a lot of likes, but the reality is that we should all realize that it’s a highlight reel, not a play-by-play of someone’s life.