A Mid-Winter Spiral from the Depths of My Own Highlight Reel
Looking at my summer clothing pictures on Instagram sent me into a body-image tailspin this winter. How much are we fooling ourselves with our own highlight reel?
A few months ago—with nothing better to do with my time—I opened a highlight reel on my own Instagram profile. The “gear testing” highlight is mostly pictures of myself wearing clothes and apparel sent to me for testing, with a few details about each piece.
These pictures help me visually track of what I’m testing, and people have told me it’s fun to see the season’s upcoming apparel. But an unexpected side effect was that seeing strategically posed images of my fit, tan summer self made me feel terrible. It was enough to make me jump off the bed and stare at at the mirror in abject horror, clocking my sallow winter complexion, undefined stomach, thighs that hadn’t pedaled a bike since October.
I felt a familiar pit of shame and revulsion, and because I can’t let anything go, I took several “current” photos and spent a cursed 30 minutes flipping back and forth between the winter summer pictures.
It’s easy to remind myself that everyone else’s social media is a highlight reel of their lives, but it’s harder to convince myself that I am also posting my own highlight reel.
Since I rarely post photos that show my average life (slumped on the couch in sweatpants squinting at a computer screen) and I definitely don’t post anything that isn’t physically flattering, the visual evidence of my life looks pretty flawless. And while I’m not dedicated enough to pull out a ring light or do a horrifying TikTok dance, my pose for the apparel pictures is still strategic. Feet shoulder width apart so my thighs don’t touch, back slightly arched to make my waist look smaller, stomach sucked in.
The attention economy has created a chokepoint for what we display online and what ends up in our archives. It’s a great recipe for a mid-winter meltdown. Since I took these pictures, you’d think I could intellectualize that they are not an accurate representation, but you’d be wrong!
Many of us fall into individual traps of how we aim to be perceived, creating a curated, audience-facing identity distilled into a character we show the world. When I catch myself comparing my true self to my internet self, I cannot believe I’m spending my one wild and precious life analyzing the difference in two highly posed images I took of myself.
What identity are you curating when you post a photo? What is the online version of yourself trying to prove? That you’re perpetually outdoors with an eye-catching backdrop? That you always prepare a show-stopping meal? That you have friends? That you’re funny and irreverent? That your life is is exciting and stimulating and active? With the exception of the show-stopping meal, those are all things I’m trying to portray.
The “rose-colored glasses” adage means looking at past events or time periods with false optimism. In other words, the way we remember things might not be accurate, and we tend to recall them in the best light. Thanks to our own social media, we now have photo evidence to support this and confirm our suspicions I knew looked better last summer. Time to spiral.
I ended up setting a time limit on Instagram (20 minutes a day is just enough time to answer messages and maybe post a picture of my cat) and I deleted Twitter from my phone after getting a particularly egregious screentime report. It’s helped, but I also need to be realistic about my own online persona and the trap of believing my own highlight reel.
Eventually it will be time to log off permanently, but social media helps with readership and engagement, and as a solo freelancer, part of my job means being my own brand. That comes with its own set of complications that requires way more words than I have patience to write and you have patience to read, but if you’re feeling similar, I’d be curious to know how other people aim to be perceived, and what it does to their own self perception.
You had me at "It's called fashion sweaty look it up"