Social media has changed our aspirations. It’s changed the way we see ourselves, creating a new layer of perfectionist pressure in every aspect of our lives, but equally enabling us to share resources, opinions, help and information more quickly than ever before. We love it, we hate it, we can’t get off it, we have mixed feelings.
Those mixed feelings and extreme highs and lows are something model and activist Naomi Shimada and fashion journalist Sarah Raphael explore in their new book Mixed Feelings: Exploring Modern Life and the Internet, One Discussion at a Time.
With their book they explore what the internet and social media is doing to our minds, bodies and hearts, while celebrating difference at the same time. The book is a bulwark against the onslaught of images of perfectionism and aspiration we are bombarded with on a daily basis; a guide to show that however you’re feeling, you’re not alone. Read an extract below.
I first started seeing a therapist during a six-month period of insomnia and depression a few years ago when all the little things I didn’t like about myself – which get called ‘imperfections’ – were going round my head on a loop as I walked to work or lay awake in bed. I would stare at other people’s selfies, listing all the ways I didn’t measure up.
The obsessive thoughts I was having when scrolling through Instagram started to interrupt me in real life and I became so self-conscious that, when I spoke to people, I’d feel very aware of how my face looked as I was talking. Had they noticed the hair on the side of my face? Did speaking make my lips look thin?
When I shared these thoughts with my therapist, embarrassed about how they sounded out loud, her expression was somewhere between a raised eyebrow and a frown. ‘I understand that’s how you feel about yourself,’ she said, ‘but the person you are describing is not the person sat in front of me.’ I later realised it was the person I saw in the reverse camera on my phone.