A few weeks ago, I jotted down the title to this. I’m not sure what triggered me to scribble it down. I think I was thinking about why I feel the desire to share personal things online, when in reality I’m quite a private person. And yet, I share my blog posts on Facebook and I post small tidbits about my life to Instagram and Facebook. And perhaps the strangest part of it all is that I feel almost completely comfortable putting myself out there online. It’s a choice that comes naturally to me.
Backtrack about 10 years. I was on the plane travelling from Australia to the US, and found myself watching a documentary made by YouTube called ‘Life in a day 2010’ — (see attached video.) The premise of the documentary is that YouTube asked people across the world to send in clips of their day — July 24, 2010, which they then turned into a movie. In the blur of plane travel, in those endless hours of time suspended between the blackness out of the windows and half the plane wrapped in those flimsy plane blankets, I watched the entire thing from start to finish.
But tonight, as I sat down to write this post, the last four minutes of the movie is all I remembered. If you skip to the very end of the attached clip, you might see why. “I want people to know that I’m here. I don’t want to cease to exist,” says the young woman, looking directly at the camera. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I’m this great person because I don’t think I am — at all. I think I’m a normal girl, a normal life, not interesting enough to know anything about, but I want to be. And today, even though nothing great really happened, tonight I feel as if something great happened.”
On the plane, eleven years ago, I felt it, and rewatching it again tonight, I felt it again. I can relate to her words, because they are true for me too. I continue to write posts and share online because, just like this young woman, I don’t want to fall into the abyss of anonymity. I want to be known, I want to make my mark somehow. And perhaps most of all, I want to be seen. If sharing online is my gateway to that, so be it.
Social media thrives on people sharing their lives. It’s something most of us do. It’s something we want to do and will do willingly. Maybe we all share the desire to be seen. Maybe that’s what drives us. Maybe we all need to know that there are people out there who will read our words, click on our photos. Maybe social media is our own little way of saying to the world, ‘Hey, I’m here. I exist.’
Or maybe it’s something else. You decide.