humans – An Indelible Friend

In my generation, a big part of the way we connect with one another is through messaging. Some of the best laughs I have with my friends is when we’re all firing messages off in our group chat, getting silly over someone’s use of caps lock or a stupid gif they sent. But somehow society takes those moments of joy and laughter, and categorises them as pitiful or poor examples of ‘genuine’ human connection. All because there’s a screen involved.

In general people like to complain about the amount of time the younger generation ‘wastes’ in front of their devices, and I do I agree with many of the points made in that discussion. However, I don’t see how it’s exclusively the youth who stare gormlessly at their phones for hours. We have to give some credit to the grandmas out there being total Facebook queens: somehow they manage to share, like and comment on every family member’s posts the SECOND they’re posted. And that’s a serious skill which deserves some recognition.

So, yes, clearly young people are the ones who know all the newest apps and how to use them, but it’s not just us ‘wasting’ time on social media.

I’ve put quotation marks around the word ‘waste’ here because I think we need to stop being so constantly negative about social media. It’s no secret that there are huge negative consequences for our physical and mental health when we overuse our phones. And we know that sometimes the internet can be a really dangerous place. But even knowing all of that, I still don’t think that social media is exclusively toxic.

For example, there are a lot of people in the world who find solace in life on the internet. There are stories of kids who feel entirely alone in their physical reality, but the second they step online they feel freer to be themselves. For years children just suffered on their own in places they felt they didn’t belong, and now there’s always another place for them to go to feel accepted. How is that not worthwhile?

With everything, there are positive and negative aspects: there will always be examples of extremes on both sides. Surely, that doesn’t mean that we should solely focus on the negative extreme? What about the good bit?

Like for me now on Day who-cares-what of Peruvian isolation, social media has been a total saving grace for my state of mind. No matter my location or time zone I’ve been able to see, talk to, and even watch films with my friends. We’re still able to laugh hysterically together, and forget the fact that we don’t know how long it’ll be until we can give each other a big phat hug again.

I spend too much time looking at my phone: I know I do. I know that spending hours on end watching Netflix or scrolling through Instagram doesn’t do my mental health much good. I know that after a while it makes me feel lethargic, more self-critical, and a lot less motivated to do anything productive.

BUT, as much as we love to complain about it and as much as we know the problems it gives us, we love social media. We love to laugh at silly videos, we love to sit and message our friends for hours, and we love to zone out and just stare at a screen for a bit.

So let’s just start to admit that we can’t help but love it! Then maybe we’ll work out how to respect it, and have more of a healthy relationship with it.

I think that loving your body and the way it looks every single day is impossible. But don’t worry, I don’t mean this as a massive downer, or some precursor to a hugely self-deprecating blog: relax.

I just mean it in the sense that having insecurities, and waking up some mornings thinking you look about as attractive as a sea cucumber (those things are not pretty, don’t try and tell me that they are), is not the end of the world. Insecurities are normal and healthy, as long as you don’t let them overwhelm you.

For me, the things I don’t love about my body are largely based around how I think I look when I move. I just don’t like the idea that my disability causes me to have a limp or is accentuated when I walk. This doesn’t mean that I think it’s a big deal when other disabled people have a limp, it just means that somewhere in my head, I feel insecure about whether I might have one. Does that make sense?

You might read that and think: ‘no, that doesn’t make sense, why be bothered by such a minor thing? Plus, you are disabled, so if you did have a limp then it’d make sense and not be a big deal’. But that’s how insecurities work: I tell you what I don’t like about myself, you say you barely even noticed, that you don’t care and think that I shouldn’t either, I thank you, feel better for a second, but still duck my head before I see my legs reflected in shop windows.

So where do we go from there?

Well, what’s clear is that businesses prosper when people don’t feel good about themselves: that’s part of the reason we buy things. We’re also addicted to scrolling through social media and looking at examples of ‘perfect people’ in ‘perfect places’ with ‘perfect lives’. Basically, we like to see what’s beautiful.

So obviously a huge remedy to our insecurities would be to recognise that what we see on social media is a fragment of the truth, but we know this already. And obviously we need more varied representation of body types in the media, but it’s also impossible to represent everyone because each individual human is different – and there are a lot of us. So in all of this, we haven’t really been able to solve the problem…

And that’s because there simply isn’t a quick, one-step solution to getting rid of all of our insecurities. Humans will always find flaws in how we look because improvement, jealousy and seeking perfection are just in our nature.

But something that we can definitely try to do, is not let our insecurities consume us. By all means, feel it, and even wallow in it for a minute, but don’t let what you don’t like about yourself be the only thing you think about. You know you won’t like how you feel after thinking about it, so why waste your time like that?

We all have to become more aware of how we treat ourselves, so if you’re looking for a one-sentence piece of advice on how to do that, I guess all I can say is:

just don’t be a b****.

An Indelible Friend

Tag: humans

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