Doing It For The 'Gram

"We're all self-expressing. It's the conformity of our time," - Adam Curtis 

A Holiday From Wi-Fi

When I was pregnant with my little boy, I went to Wales with my partner and his father - two large, affable, mischievous Welshmen. It was a real, proper holiday, the kind of holiday I hadn't known I needed until I found myself in the middle of it, breathing a sigh of relief.

You see, on this holiday, we had no Wi-Fi. No phone reception. I found myself, for the first time in eighteen years (give or take), cut adrift from the internet. 

And this turned out to be a bigger deal than I had expected. 

This holiday was to a location where my partner (let's call him Dai) and his dad regularly liked to go, plus or minus a motley assortment of brothers, sisters, nephews (my son is one of seven grandsons) and dogs. It was not, therefore, selected via Trip Advisor. I had not spent evenings browsing Canopy and Stars for a location with maximum Instagrammability. It was a place where I could feel things, do things, think things, but not share them. It was a place of realness, of being - ironically - connected.

I found myself in the back of the car one evening, easing along a narrow, winding Pembrokeshire lane in the last of the summer sunlight. One hand was resting on the swell of my bump - a by-now-automatic gesture - and I found myself thinking about the baby.

We had decided to keep the baby's sex a surprise. And I - with my history of internet obsession, constant diets, and total preoccupation with my appearance - found myself in paroxysms of terror... What if the baby was a girl? How would I protect my daughter? What could I teach her that would keep her safe from the crippling messages - how to look, dress, behave, think - that society insists women must labour under? Though my baby was a boy, he needs me just as much as any daughter would have, and he needs all of me - not the spare bits left after a wedding diet, or the half of my brain not preoccupied with writing witty captions for his Instagram photos.

Since childhood, I have felt driven to document my existence. As if, if I didn't present the sum total of my life and experiences for others to review, to admire, to pass judgement on, I don't really exist. Therefore, to find myself under the warm summer sun with nothing but a good book and good company - and no way of telling people about it - I at first felt anxious, panicky. What use was a holiday if no one knew what a good time I was having? What good was it to relax if that girl I fell out with three years ago wasn't jealous of how damn relaxed I was? Every trip I'd taken since the advent of home internet had been dissected online, sometimes for a wide audience during my stint as a Goth blogger. My trip to Cornwall several months previous had been photographed from every angle, and at the end of each day I stretched out my legs on the floral duvet of our B&B bed and presented that day's doings to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. As though that had been the point. 

Part of the reason I stopped blogging was because I had started living my life FOR the blog - choosing my activities, experiences and outfits through the lens of how I would write it up later, and what I thought would look good to my readers. My every movement, choice, purchase was curated for my invisible audience. Instead of being me, I was performing me. 

And now, a decade later, I still hadn't stopped. My image had changed, my platform had changed, but the actions were the same. Haul posts. Selfies. Outfit of the day. (And here I am blogging again! Irony, right?! But I'm hoping that weekly posts and relative anonymity will allow me a creative outlet without turning into MY ENTIRE LIFE.)

Instagram was my favourite platform. I posted daily. My phone was connected to me by an invisible umbilical. Once outdoorsy, I could no longer function without WiFi. Worryingly, I noticed my attention span being obliterated - I stopped being able to read books without checking my phone every few paragraphs, then lengthy articles. I struggled to take in the meaning of the words on the page, I was so preoccupied. Soon I couldn't follow the plot of a movie because my attention was on my phone. My writing, a constant since childhood, dried up. In my teens, when we still had dial up and a PC, I'd often been online up to eight hours a day. Now, I was waking up at 2am to check for new likes.

At first, Instagram recaptured my childhood joy in documenting my world. From mixtapes to diaries, I have always enjoyed the process of capturing and showcasing snapshots of a given moment in time. My first really big purchase, circa age thirteen, was a handheld camcorder, which saw years of heavy use as my friends and I recorded interviews, snippets of daily life and deeply questionable comedy skits, before VHS technology became sadly outdated. 

So at first blush, I thrilled to Instagram. I used it like a photo diary, but four years in, using the app for around five hours a day, I was not only addicted but concerned about the messages I was putting out. Look what I've bought! Look how quirky I am! Notice me, you guys, I'm being authentic as hard as I can! Again, my life had become about how it appeared from the outside. I was desperate for people to see the 'real me', to notice my uniqueness. Eventually, I began to feel almost as though the things I did weren't relevant if they weren't documented on Instagram. 

Technology and shopping became irresistibly intertwined. Like an influencer? Buy her outfit. Toilet break? ASOS awaits. I didn't realise that what I was doing, essentially, was continually marketing to myself. I couldn't stop shopping until I stopped browsing. And when I tried to stop browsing... I couldn't.

Authenticity and Consumption

Everything we do is online. For a long time, I thought that the best way to be myself in a world where everyone is watching was to strive for total transparency in the name of authenticity. I figured it was kinda punk of me to post bedheaded, no-make-up selfies, to not (appear to) worry about whether or not I looked good. 

However, I wasn't doing anything in real life. Life was something that happened around me, outside the bubble I was in. Just as I once did with my Goth blog, I was buying things and going places purely to have the photo to post online. Case in point: I recently looked back at photos of me that my friend Alice took when we had a girls' weekend in London. In all but one candid snap of me, guess what I'm doing? That's right, I'm on Instagram. Head down, looking at my phone. Even in the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Even in the National Gallery, for chrissakes. 

I was addicted to Instagram just as I had once obsessed over my blog, to the detriment of all else. Except modern apps made the addictive, obsessive behaviours even more damaging - not only was I once again pouring all my time into an online persona, but this time the nature of social media meant that it was affecting my confidence, my sleep, my memory, my ability to converse... I was scrolling through Instagram during conversations, under the table (how rude and obnoxious!).

Even GoodReads, which I had previously thought of as a fairly innocuous way to discover new books, has its pitfalls. For the uninitiated, GoodReads is an app where you can track what you're reading, read and share reviews, and get book recommendations based on what you've liked. However, GoodReads also runs an annual reading challenge, where the goal is simply to read a number of books (you choose your mileage) in a year. Reading has always been one of my greatest pleasures, but I found that the GoodReads challenge turned it into a numbers game. I wanted to get lost in books again, to meander and amble, not plough through them to meet an arbitrary goal. Like so much of modern life, GoodReads puts the emphasis on consumption, rather than enjoyment. 

Escaping from my need to present my life, my thoughts, my heart and soul online, was difficult. Each day with my baby boy, I yearned to post each new expression, discovery and sound. He quickly learned to hate my phone as a rival, beginning to cry each time I reached for it. When I started the shopping ban and was forced to cut down on browsing time, I remembered that trip to Wales and how pleasant life could be when I stopped being under the thumb of social media. Reading what I want - no GoodReads challenges. Life for living, not a continual performance.

Life Without The 'Gram

June came hot and humid. I'd deleted my social media apps and found myself abruptly adrift in reality, without the crutches I had become accustomed to. I started sleeping with my phone outside the bedroom, turned off notifications for email, and used my tablet only for reading ebooks. At first I was irritable, anxious, checking phantom vibrations and hiding my phone in ever more tricky-to-access places to stop me picking it up habitually. I installed a timer app to keep my usage under control.

Unable to shop, unable to kill time on social media, I found myself suddenly in possession of swathes of time. My son was no longer a needy loud creature distracting me from the important things I needed to do online, he was a little person, desperate for his mummy's undivided attention. I started baking cookies. I invited friends over. I caught up with Vikings and Bake-Off - able to watch entire episodes at a time, something I couldn't do when I was entirely caught up in gadgetry. I started to go outside, taking the Spud for daily walks in the buggy. 

Unfortunately, this newfound reengagement with the physical world proved to be my downfall, albeit in a very minor way. On Day 35, my dad took me and the Spud to a village fete. It was idyllic, quintessentially British; a blue sky with fluffy white clouds, thatched cottages, bunting riffling in the warm breeze. Spud and I shared a bowl of fat ripe strawberries and cream in the shade of a mammoth oak tree. And, entirely without thinking, I got chatting to a local beekeeper selling her wares, and cheerfully, unthinkingly, broke the shopping ban - a £1 honey lip balm! 

I didn't even realise what I'd done until we were in the car on the way home, and then I had to laugh - of all the things I could have bought, it certainly could have been worse. At least I'd supported a local craftsperson with my slip, and I was hardly the last of the big spenders! Still, I was a little disappointed at breaking my streak, and astonished at how mindlessly I had made a purchase.

Small mistakes aside, it was during this month that the reality of my financial situation began to sink in. With no further income of my own, the years ahead looked bleak and frightening. I started looking at our household budget to see what could be tightened up, the beginnings of an interest in frugality and thrift, a mindset which both my parents had tried to instill.

In an odd way, I felt sad at times at the prospect of going for such a long period without just buying whatever I wanted. But I could already sense that it might come to be liberating; more money for travelling, meals out, days at the beach, and freedom from indoctrination - perhaps I might develop an immunity to advertising, social media envy, comparison. How good might it feel, to just step off the consumer carousel and walk away?

Accountability Corner

Lastly, a little update on how I have been doing this week - up until this morning, I can report that things were going really well, I am at 33 days into my ban and counting. I actually felt I had a bit of a breakthrough this week. Something expensive I'd been thinking about buying for a while was on special offer. My partner suggested I was clear to make the purchase, as it leaned more towards the experiential than the material (although on reflection I'm not sure I agree). I got as far as adding to cart and entering my details... Then I closed the tab. Because I'd approached the purchase more slowly and thoughtfully than usual, I was able to notice that I felt uncomfortable and recognise that spending the money wasn't sitting right with me, instead of just pushing on anyway for the buying high. Later, I learned that the purchase wouldn't have met my needs anyway, so I'd saved myself an expensive flop.

However, this morning I found some Re-Fashion discount codes when I was deleting old emails. I didn't want them to be wasted, so I offered one to a friend and used one myself - £5 off a £15 dress (Collectif, purple velvet wrap dress - stunning). I okayed the purchase in advance with my partner and my mum (as you do!), and they both said it didn't count as a ban break. But I'm not so sure - was it a good use of resources available, or technically breaking my own rules, second-hand clothes still being clothes? Let me know what you think!

I'd also like to say thank you to my talented friend Georgie of Georgie Writes, who inspired me to start this blog in the first place and has been ever so encouraging and supportive, and to all my other friends who are taking the time to check in here every week and see what I'm rambling about. Thank you so much for reading my words!