As an influencer I am constantly asked: “What’s your morning routine?” I had started an Instagram account in 2017 to share my art online; today that account has more than half a million followers, largely women, who I talk to every single day. It was a very simple question that, last year, became hard for me to answer.
The truth was, it began with me screaming into my pillow the second I was asked to do something. The idea of even taking a shower had become too much of a burden. Out of habit, my mornings revolved around the ritual of going online and balancing myself on the unpredictable scales of social-media algorithms, the fate of my mood that day depending entirely on the opinion of strangers. Every time I logged on was judgment day, activating my body into fight or flight in preparation for whether I’d experience social rejection or praise. All the while requests, from my audience, my team and the people in my life, piled on top of me every hour. The expectation to be constantly accessible to everyone at all times was suffocating. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.
Social media was always something I’d enjoyed, using it as a medium to express myself with the aim to inspire others. Over the years I’d developed a relationship with my audience by sharing pretty intimate things about myself. I wanted to let other women know that they weren’t the only ones to be confused about their sexuality, hump their pillows or stay in a relationship with someone they knew was harming them. My Instagram stories were always filled with the same kind of joy and empowerment as you’d find in a cubicle in the girls’ bathroom on a night out.
Handing over these little titbits of information about myself felt inconsequential – . As someone who had no shame about these things it was something I felt comfortable sharing to let others know they weren’t alone. And women messaged in their thousands to say they had experienced the same things – and often they couldn’t believe they weren’t the only ones. But as I attracted more followers, the misinformation spreading about me online increased, too. My name, face and image also became pieces of content created by others, turned into neatly packaged soundbites and opinions massaged to capture viewers’ attention. I once stumbled upon a video of a man describing in detail why the shape of my stomach was disgusting, while people piled in with comments agreeing that I needed to lose weight. The stakes for posting online grew higher and took a greater toll on my mental health than I had ever experienced before.
Last autumn, I cried with frustration before making an Instagram post. Nothing political, nothing bold, nothing brave, literally just a photo dump of things I’d gathered in my camera roll over the past few months. A selfie here and there. A picture of a building. It seems like an overreaction, but I’d developed a fear of being publicly visible; the idea of people talking about me had begun to chip away at my ability to express myself. Public shaming was something I had to mentally prepare myself for every time I posted online, ever since the inception of my account six years ago.
By this point, anything I did could trigger it. Even something as innocuous as a selfie or a picture of my croissant caused controversy (I wish I was joking). I lost faith in people for a while and wondered what the point of it all was. The act of expressing myself in any way had now been linked to a deep, sinking sensation of shame in my body and birthed a mean inner critic that made me feel worthless. I slowly started to avoid posting online and, at first, it made me feel safe. I figured that nothing bad could happen if I didn’t put myself out there. But when I stopped sharing aspects of my personal life, it gave the internet the freedom to fill in the gaps, to make things up and assume the rest. I’m not a movie star, a TV presenter or someone in the industry with a team of people who have years of experience in how to handle this stuff – I’m a woman who chose to share herself online and shot to a level of public visibility that left me feeling like public property, open to critique at any time. It was nothing I could have prepared myself for.
Eventually, I was shaken out of my inertia. I was so burnt out that before I could make the decision to rest, my body voted for me. I had been left unable to walk owing to a stress-induced slipped disc. I was incapable of standing for longer than half a minute. Any time I tried to walk or even get out of bed nerve pain like an electric shock would shoot down my leg, as though my body had had enough and had resorted to electrocuting me. I’d been stripped of my ability to produce anything; my rest had finally become non-negotiable.
After I’d started to heal up, I travelled to Tokyo during the winter to do absolutely nothing. I read books, I drank coffee, watched people from the streets and, one day, cried in awe at how delicious the seasonal shifts in the parks were. I noticed there were very few public seating areas or benches in Japan and that parks were the only places in the city that indicated to its inhabitants that it was good to take a rest outside. I realised I was slowly starting to reconnect with a piece of myself that I had lost back home in London to “busyness”.
In How to Do Nothing, author Jenny Odell speaks of her favourite rose garden, which was once almost converted into a block of condos: “Spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat – since what they produce can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified.” She draws a comparison between this phenomenon of converting outdoor spaces into “productive sites” and what we are currently experiencing in our minds, with the attention economy. “I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonisation of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of our selves are always about to be turned into condos.”
Just like the parks and benches of the city, my rest in Tokyo posed a delicious disruption to my productivity-fetishised life. In those months, I’d started to care less about wanting to build myself up online and dedicated hours a day instead to sitting on park benches and journalling (though, admittedly, I may have had to fight my own muscles to stop taking a selfie of me doing it).
In the breathing space of “doing nothing” and taking myself offline, it allowed me to see that there was a much longer lasting and rewarding incentive to keeping some moments of my life sacred, un-captured and untouched by digital voyeurs. I realised that the reason most of us online struggle to see this incentive is that the reward isn’t immediately visible. Whereas the reward for sharing and commodifying your life on social media is instant, tangible (and potentially financially rewarding) – and we don’t live in a culture that praises or rewards us for our invisible assets, we want everything in front of us and we want it now.
Journalling on a bench in Tokyo after days of barely checking my phone, I decided to ask my audience to share their small moments of joy with me that evening – to discuss their versions of the lovely, invisible and unwitnessed moments of beauty that we all collect throughout the day and to which a phone camera will never do justice. The responses swam quickly into my inbox: tasting saltwater on my lips after swimming in the sea for the first time this summer; watching people move their picnic blankets a little further as they follow the sun setting; putting garnishes on top of all my dishes. In the act of paying attention to these little moments, the exercise encouraged people to actively scan their days and their environments for something beautiful that grounded them in the present. I had forgotten I had the ability to control my experience of social media by how and when I chose to engage with it. Suddenly, it all started to feel a lot lighter.
I realised there was a more sustainable and emotionally evolved way to have the positive effect I wanted on social media. I had spent years building a platform encouraging women to speak their minds; back then you would have found me hopping online first thing in the morning ranting about a feminist discovery or an uncomfortable truth I’d stumbled upon and sometimes, you still can, but the phrase “If you’re not angry you’re not paying attention” rang through my ears like it was doctrine. For years I took it on as my personal responsibility to keep the masses as informed as possible. After my time in Tokyo, I’d considered that the opposite of that sentiment was also true; that if you couldn’t find anything beautiful, it’s because you weren’t paying attention.
Joyful content doesn’t perform as well on the algorithm as the hateful, rage-fuelled sensationalist pieces encouraging quick emotional responses and debate. But nonetheless, I decided that I wanted to intentionally infuse social media with a ton of it. I realised your joy does not take away or subtract from anyone else’s. Unlike privilege, joy is not a zero-sum game where if someone else has it, it means there’s less for you. Joy has the opposite effect. It has the potential to actually add value to other people’s lives, not subtract. You pass it on. It has a viral-like effect where it multiplies. Joy is a currency that helps to make the world a better place, and this year after my rest I decided that I would give myself permission to once again be contagious with it.
I can say truthfully that my social media platforms are currently places where I feel fantastic and that this has nothing to do with how well my content performs, or whether people are “engaging” with me – but everything to do with the fact that I have slowly, with small and manageable steps, built up the habit of using it to express myself regardless of the outcome and developed strict boundaries around when I use it and what I use it for.
This might sound like another plea to encourage you to be in the moment – and perhaps even hypocritical as someone whose job it is to be constantly online – but I write this to let you know that even women like me, influencers who seemingly live online, do not really “live” online; and if we do, we suffer. To have a healthy relationship with social media you have to remember it is a thirsty parasite that wants our most valuable resource: time. In its ever-changing landscape where we can either be raised up into the viral heavens or dropped the next day into an irrelevant stream of content, the key, I realised, is to assert yourself into the space with an air of playfulness, a state that can only be attained once we take some control.
Girlcrush by Florence Given is published by Brazen. Buy a copy for £9.29 at guardianbookshop.com