Influencer-itis: My Insides vs. Your Outsides
Influencers are making a lot of my friends sad these days, especially the so-called self-help influencers who proclaim we can have richer, fuller lives if we ... fill in the blank. Bake a better sourdough, play a better game of poker, build a better set of abs, declutter everything, buy new sheets, new blenders, new legos, start a coaching business, buy a rental property, get hair extensions, have dinner not in front of the tv.
Most of my friends’ lives already meet all the basic needs, and then some. They’re housed, fed, clothed, loved, and have some kind of daily purpose paid or unpaid that gets them up in the morning: Clients, kids, partners, parents, pets, causes, gardens, something. They’d be missed if they were gone.
And yet, there’s a longing for something more that colors the day with disappointment, sometimes mild, sometimes howling. Most days it’s like we’re fish and this teeny tiny creeping disappointment is the water — unnoticeable it’s so omnipresent.
We look at pictures of influencers or worse, people we actually know, on top of mountains or up on stages, on the catwalk, or in that perfect moment with family skipping and frolicking and we think, “I want that.”
And I know I personally don’t want to go to a top of a literal mountain right now. I really don’t. But the feeling of freedom and accomplishment and potency that represents, yes I want that.
And if I think back on my life, I’ve had plenty of fabulous snapshot moments, some captured. I’ve been on top of mountains and on cliffs at sunset and in big fancy offices and beaches and faraway places. I’ve been much thinner and younger and perhaps cooler, on the outside.
I’ve been all the Barbies, well not all, but enough of them to know that what I look like on the outside, where I am or what I’m doing, has very very little to do with what I feel like on the inside.
That the feeling of freedom, potency, calm, and enough-ness is an inside job. And I get to feel that right now, right here, lying on my stomach on the living room floor with earplugs in so I don’t hear too much of the other two’s zooms, still in my bathrobe at 12:45pm, catching this moment to write between making snack (reheated vegan sausage, side of grapes) and making lunch (reheated rigatoni).
How lucky am I? Super lucky. When I focus on how much of my life is working for me, right now, rather than on what other people’s lives look like and how my life could be would be should be more like theirs, I’m free. I’m cured of influencer-itis. I’m gonna keep going.
www.livingeveryminuteofit.com
www.combatcovidstress.com
