The above photos are me & also me. One is on a day that I am shooting tons of photos, with my hair done, makeup fully done, no kids with me, and the other is on a day when I take a mental health day to spend the full day with my kids. I wake up in the morning, I throw on a sweatshirt and biker shorts, and I do 0 to look any kind of way, other than how I looked rolling out of bed.
In normal non-influencer society, I think people have more of those “off” days than full make-up days. I honestly feel more comfortable at the park playing when I look this way! In real life, the emphasis on looks is so minor in comparison to how someone makes you “feel” in-person, their interests, their hobbies, their personality, their heart. In the influencer space, so much of who we are is based on how we look, and the deeper into motherhood I travel (and the older I become) the more I think this emphasis takes its toll on my mental health. For me, it is not that I feel less than on the days I have a bare face. Back in 2018, maybe I would say I did feel less than on those days. I would make sure that every single photo taken of me, every story taken of me, any time I saw people, I looked like the image I was portraying online. The pressure I put on myself was not sustainable. Now, as a mom of two who is alone with the kids a majority of the time, I do not care to upkeep that image any longer. I am a human like the rest of the world, and I don’t feel it’s healthy to have to be perfect 24/7. BUT the influx of DM’s about how different I look when I hop on stories on days when I am not taking photos is what has started to weigh on my mental state. When I worked a 9-5 job I would “get ready for work” and then when I got home I would take off any makeup I had on (much less than photoshoot makeup!) and throw on sweats, but for some reason bloggers are supposed to always appear a certain way?
I’ve been seeing more and more conversations on influencers and mental health, and influencers coming out and saying they are depressed or anxious, and I can tell you this much – the weight of 300K+ peoples judgements can sometimes be a lot to handle. Granted, it’s something that I’ve brought upon myself, as I know, but I also did not think that I would ever ever have this many eyeballs on me when I began to share my vintage outfits that I shot on a tripod on my street in Miami back 10 years ago. If I share a story with filters, I am promoting unachievable beauty standards. If I share my bare face, I look old, and I am lazy for not getting ready. As a way to personally protect myself, I have been feeling 0 guilt in taking personal health days, in which I don’t get ready, I get outside a lot with the kids, I don’t post on my feed, and I take 0 photos. I have been trying hard to consolidate the days that I shoot photos to maybe 2-3 days per week, so that I can focus on other more important things than HOW I LOOK on the other 4 days of the week.
“Influencers” in 2020 are the easiest target. We’re out there, we’re posting trivial things (that also make people happy, let’s not forget!) like clothing or makeup tutorials, and it has been a rough ass year for almost everybody for one reason or another. Here we are, posting smiling photos every single day, standing in our decorated homes, being annoying. I GET IT. I totally understand why influencer culture is an easy thing to hate on, but from the other side of the coin, that 1 photo that you see is not the full picture. For a lot of us, myself included, this is our job. I supported my two kids and my husband through his loss of income during COVID for the first half of the year doing this job, and I did that with 0 maternity leave, jumping in front of the camera only days after giving birth. I am not complaining at all, that isn’t what this is, because I feel so so grateful to have had that work, but this is me trying to humanize the “influencers” a bit. We’re people, and we’re going through shit too. We’re also going through it with thousands upon thousands of eyes watching us. Constructive criticism is invited, helpful and to be expected of course, but it’s the downright mean criticism that is hard to unsee when laying in bed at night.
So this is where I am at, just trying to enjoy my children at the incredible ages they are at, focusing on them and their milestones VS how perfectly curled my hair looks, and trying to keep my mind on the why’s behind why I share my life online. It’s for the human connection piece, it’s to spread positivity into a world that could really use it lately and it’s to document things that make me happy. I’m allowing myself to feel the pressure, but also to release it with each breath out. To understand why someone may judge me or dislike me based on my obsessively orange feed, but also know that they don’t know me in-person and may feel differently upon having a beer with me. and above all else, trying to keep my anxiety in check for myself and my kids.