Last winter, I did the noble thing and got off social media. I lacked the inner strength to delete my accounts fully, so I settled for removing apps from my phone and enlisting my husband to change my Facebook password. It worked. I stopped scrolling and liking and generally monitoring the lives of people I do not actually know. I felt better — less inadequate, more present, vaguely morally superior.
The problem is it’s July now, and I just returned from a really great vacation.
If you take a summer vacation and don’t post about it, did it even happen? I have a visceral urge to pull up my Instagram — the app is gone, but I’ve figured out a workaround that involves Googling a dog influencer’s account, then toggling over to my own profile — and curate a perfect vacation carousel.
You know the one. Blurry selfie with husband, beaming faces close together. Posed photo of children against scenic backdrop. Overhead shot of colorful local food.
When I was on social media, I monitored and digested such posts as though they were required reading on a college syllabus. I liked feeling as though I knew what everyone in my orbit — co-workers, friends, some mom in Raleigh I found on the Explore tab — was up to, and how my days might compare. I shared my own photos on my children’s birthdays, my wedding anniversary and, always, vacations.
I know that craving the high of posting, of all those comments and hearts, is lame, and likely indicative of low self-esteem. And yet there’s something I desperately miss about sharing travel photos. Here is the person I want to be: carefree, adventurous, global. The fun mom who lets her kids climb on dangerous play structures overseas. (They’re fine!) The together mom who did not forget to buy Harry Potter Warner Bros. Studio Tour tickets five months in advance. (By the grace of two calendar reminders and two alarms.)
Sharing makes it so, somehow. It freezes time, too. If I don’t post, the photos are still there, swirling in the jumble that is my iCloud account. But when I winnow them down to just what I want to remember, when I can tap on my profile and see them lined up there, it feels sturdy, like some unimpeachable record of my life.