I Am Not My Online Persona
I think I’m more funny in real life. More vibrant, bigger somehow. Not afraid to be the butt of the joke. Prone to tears when I see something beautiful or endearing. On our walks back from town my boyfriend has to stand like he’s waiting for a toddler as I coo over sunsets in puddles and textures on a brick wall.
It feels like there’s a disjoint between this actual me, and the me I am online. It’s not to say that the me online isn’t my own words or a real version of me, but it’s a side of me that is ramped up out of proportion to how much it exists in my whole being. Online I feel more aloof, serious, sensitive, like whenever I speak I have to say something. I feel weighty, I feel enigmatic, I feel distant.
This is in part due to the nature of the work I produce online, and my writing style. I am interesting in exploring these deep and weighty topics, in exploring feelings and motivations and trying to reach for understandings of the un-understand-able. Perhaps this side of me feels louder online because this is where it mostly exists.
But it’s also because I think this is how I have to be here. Not in a pernicious, conscious way, but in the way of an unquestioned belief that served you until it didn’t. I started out online just after personal blogging really boomed, and where anecdotes about people’s lives had been replaced by being of value. I internalised that as sharing seriously, professionally, by not leaving open ends and maybes, by harnessing a vibe that was whimsical but always providing a lesson.
Even as my work shifted and my life changed, this knowing that this is how I was supposed to show up remained a constant. After changing everything and re-branding and moving into a new season of work, I realised this belief remained.
On a muddy walk over the weekend it took me a few moments to remember what my Word of the Year was. This is so often the way after the new year is no longer new, when the life you always had continues to overrun the life you thought you’d design. Ah yes, it was Unleash. And have I been unleashing? I ask myself.
I haven’t, not in the way I intended, but having had serious family illness in January I’m not beating myself up about it. There is still time. What interests me, though, is that now something else makes sense about why I chose the word Unleash.
It hadn’t been a specific intention, because I hadn’t quite noticed the belief, but I now know that when I decided I wanted to Unleash it was to break out of this online persona I’ve accidentally forced myself into. To be a bit less serious, a bit less “valuable”, if that doesn’t sound strange to say. To bring more of lighter sides of myself, to post pictures of my day and my food and sunsets and puddles and textures of brick walls.
I am a ‘save for best’ person, I get it from my dad who has never-worn jumpers in his wardrobe that he is saving for best. I have the unlit candles (of course), and the face masks in packets , and I also have a camera roll bursting with pictures of things I loved and wanted to share but never did. I was saving them for when I said something really good to say, and then I couldn’t think of anything so they languish there, moving further and further away.
Which is ironic, because I find the content I like the best right now is the little windows into people’s lives; the Sunday coffee and newspaper, the bunch of flowers on the kitchen side, the carousels of a month in cafes and country walks. I don’t need a valuable lesson in the caption, it’s just nice to see people sharing what they love, feeling their big and small joys.
So that’s what I always meant by Unleash. It was the big things like going for it with writing and being less apologetic in making an income, but it was also this smaller (but arguably bigger) thing of showing up. Of being less of this persona I’ve backed myself into. Of turning down the contrast so that other sides of me can come into view too. Of unleashing myself. And believing that that is good enough.
