Façade – a deceptive outward appearance, pretentious, or fake.
It’s freezing. I mean almost about to snow freezing. Yet, fortunately, the chances of snow falling in Zimbabwe are close to zero. It never snows in hell. This brutal winter weather does no justice of deterring Gugu and her friends from partying all night. Its Gugu’s 25th birthday and she’s made sure she has the best time of her life, and most importantly that her 2 485 followers on Instagram see her living it up, and silently wishing they could be her that night. Well, this version of Gugu thats on parade tonight.
Finally the night is roaring in action, and the girls are painting the city of Queens and Kings red. Gugu is drowning in alcohol, drinking as if she had decided this was her last night living in this hell hole. This decision was a secret between herself and her God. This kind of appaling drinking wasn’t anything out of the norm to her friends, and the onlookers are rather thoroughly entertained by Gugu’s seductive and alluring dancing. Lights! Camera! Instagram! Gugu is snapping every single detail of her night out and her followers are loving every second of it. The night is nothing short of spectacular from the smiles and the laughs, lavish cake and food platters, designer shoes and handbags, foreign bottles of alcohol, expensive cars and handsome men.
Gugu then decides to catch her breath and touch up her makeup. Finally she’s seated alone on the cold toilet floor, staring down into her Kors clutch bag where the little pink pills lay. She would swallow them and all the pain would cease. Her back is leaning against the cubicle door and the vomit is about to arrive. But it doesn’t, instead she attempts to muffle her screams by pressing her left palm over her beautifully pink stained lips. Within seconds following her screams, Gugu’s tears break free and flow down her coated face and her bedazzled neck. She is alone. The music too loud for anyone to rescue her, her Instagram followers already offline and her friends too drunk to notice she had been missing for an hour now.
This is what we don’t see.
We do not see Gugu’s sudden explosive emotional break down. We do not know that Gugu is severely depressed and suicidal, and wanted to end it all tonight because she was raped multiple times by her boyfriend and his friend. A man she loved, adored and trusted; yet his vile actions are the reasons why tonight she would live it up and finally end it. Don’t believe the hype around couples goals…
Quick disclaimer: This article is in no way meant to bash social media! Because I enjoy social media! Even on my loneliest nights I spend senseless hours glued to my phone, scrolling on my feed page and some of my ex boyfriends pages. I am as guilty and as addicted as everyone.
Its no secret that social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter are all enabling people in my generation to create alternative lives filled with lies. Big Fat Facades! Instagram, being the most popular, allows anyone to share their personal pictures and videos for different reasons, but mostly to brag! We brag about how “blessed” we are, what we ate for breakfast, where next we are vacationing and the juiciest brag of all – our newfound love interests. Then instagram allows you to share these moments with friends and enemies, who can then like your videos and pictures.
Presumably many of us have a love and hate relationship with Instagram. We love how much power we have to curate and narrate a picture perfect life, the kind of life we want to have but may not necessarily be living. We hate how easily addictive it is and how destructive Instagram can be on our self-esteem and mental health. The more hours you find yourself scrolling on the app, the more you will begin to compare yourself to these well curated and fake representations of people’s lives. The comparison drug will hastily get you into overdrive, thinking about how lame and uneventful your life may be when in reality what you see on Instagram is the furthest from the truth.
We wake up, log on and connect with strangers who only know us on a name basis, neglecting those people who really know and love us. We then post our glamorous and glossy pictures #Iwokeuplikethis , and impatiently wait for the likes to pour in. We mostly post the good and tidied up parts of our lives. The parts that make us more attractive, and better than the next person! Some people will even go to the extremes of hiring expensive luxurious items to show off on the gram! Most of us will go to any lengths necessary to create a false image of who we truly are and voila the façade is created. For most of us this is a slippery slope because we simply do not know when to stop comparing and competing with our peers. This immense pressure to look put together has left us drowning in a pot of misery.
Here are two examples to show you just how easy make believe can be!
- As this year unfolded I abruptly decided to find the closest barber and cut my hair. Just having survived a brutal mental breakdown, this emotionally drove me to chop off my lush Afro. My self-esteem tank was on zero and I was running on empty!
But a few weeks later, I pounced onto Instagram and gloated my new buzz cut. I captioned how liberating this change was and how I was feeling invincible, when a few days earlier I was drowning in my own tears! And yet I posted it, without hesitation, because I needed the compliments and the dosage of public validation to boost to my self-esteem. In hindsight public validation is lethal, it’s as sweet as sugar, but we all know that stolen sugar gives you the worst of tummy aches.
Unmasking The Façade: I pretended my new haircut was all for change and growth when in truth I was at my lowest point.
- An old friend consistently used to post his lavish nights out! He would not miss a heartbeat to show off his weekend on instagram. His stories were saturated with beautiful women, foreign cigars and enough alcohol to intoxicate a nation! His followers (i.e. strangers) would quickly assume and conclude that my friend was never in lack, and prescribed to an upper class lifestyle. This is because this is what we saw, this was what he showed us and made believe.
Unmasking The Façade: However when we sat down to chat he opened up about how he was stuck in a dark hole for months. He found no escape from the depression, and over drinking and smoking allowed him to numb the pain for a brief moment. He was broken inside, crying out for help and what we saw was him supposedly enjoying the best years of his life!
What you don’t get to see in these edited and filtered pictures is the failure, the constant rejections, the loneliness, the depression and the yearning to belong. Our rock bottom seasons are never publicly shared, always with the fear that these seasons of our lives would make us less appealing and invincible to our peers. What you will quickly understand about social media is that vulnerability in these public spaces is a big No.
We double tap those pictures without any hesitation. Yet in real life we have lost that ability to double tap love, appreciation, and encouragement into our friends and family’s lives. This is the kind of generation we are. A lost generation.
So next time you find yourself giving into temptation to do it for the gram, ask yourself why? What are you trying to prove and to whom exactly? Which ex do you want to make jealous? Ask yourself why exactly why am I doing this? The honest answer would shock you.
Put the mask down. Disconnect for some time. I promise you wont die!
Remember you’re never alone.
Love Nat
xxxx
SincerelyNat 