My Cyber Sub-Reality

Last week, I edited a sapling over a girl standing in the background of a photo I wanted to post on Instagram. With one leg propped up on a New England curb, she looked down at her phone while I flexed into a contrived off-guard posture. This degree of editing was not new to me. Born in the digital age, social media reached me long before puberty could. At eleven years old, I layered every photo with distorting filters and color corrections. By fourteen, I had begun to edit the contour of my body. I was a girl, not yet a woman, and still, I was convinced that my natural form was a personal failure. My waist went down too straight. The fat on my backside sat too close to the bone. I had too much of too little. With small brush tools, I altered the micro-pixels that colored my photographs until I had what I considered the perfect body.

At twenty, I still open up three digital applications before I even consider posting a photo. Each post walks me into the cyber sub-reality I have carefully curated. There exists a long list of reasons detailing why my habits lead me to such a maddening place. Top of the list: young girls internalize the idea that their bodies are commodities depreciating with age and aberration; social media introduces another mile to the eons of insecurity for which women have bared the cross.

Social media was both the problem and the solution, a cyclical call-and-response beckoning me to its choir. It fed some of my insecurities and starved others. It served four-course meals to the parts of me that hated my body; it served nothing more than bread and butter to the parts who wandered in search of attention. What I felt I lacked in high school popularity, I found in social media interactions. When you attend a high school with 100 people in each graduating class, small numbers become important fractions. A party of 25 people accounts for one-fourth of the class; 300 likes on Instagram is half of the middle and high school population combined. As these statistics helmed my mind in high school, I was sure that my peers could smell the unsureness on my breath.

So, if you were to ask me now which had a greater impact on my relationship with social media — beauty as a limiting factor or being an uncool teenager — I would probably lead with the latter. Many days, it was not the henchmen of the patriarchy whispering in my ears to edit myself skinnier, but rather the entourage of women right beside them. During my most religious moments, I prayed that young boys would want me and that young girls would count the steps it took to reach my side. Social media quickly became the most accessible ruse at my disposal to convince myself and others of my contentment. Editing what I considered imperfections out of photos afforded me the control I craved in my social situation.

Today, I am a young woman with girlhood just behind her. I am myself and every girl I have ever been. I am eleven years old when I find humor in Snapchat filters, and I remain that age when I prefer vibrant colors over muted tones. I am fourteen years old when it takes me too long to find a photo of myself I like, and I remain that age when I plan my outfits around what photographs the best. At twenty, I know insecurity, but I know love too. Sometimes, all I do before I post a photo is edit the colors brighter. Other times, I edit shrubbery over Bostonian pedestrians. Most days, my social media edits level to a low hum, a frequency that rings quieter than it used to but louder than it should.