Social Media Made Me Want To Erase My Life In 2021: This Is Why I Didn’t

Throughout the last week, my social media feed has been inundated with video montages of other people’s 2021.

Every ‘Reel’ I’ve stopped my scroll to watch, has been a heart -warming record of another human being’s most memorable, tender moments and personal celebrations for the year that’s been.

I know these kinds of highlight videos are only a glimpse into somebody else’s world. No brief social media post could ever capture the whole story. But even though I know this intellectually, watching these videos has been hard for me at times, as I try to make peace with how different my life looks to so many of theirs.

I started 2021 more joyful, more hopeful and with more physical energy than I’ve felt in over decade. I honestly woke up each morning believing my most challenging days were now behind me.

I was genuinely looking forward to the year ahead. It really appeared to me and those close to me, I had finally turned a corner in my health. After years of physical suffering, I would finally be able to do more than just try and survive, I could actually start to live.

But 2021 didn’t turn out the way I hoped it would.

The second half of the year, saw me more unwell than I had been in a very long time.

Part of me wanted to erase that 6 months of my life. If I decided to make my own 2021 video montage, 50% would have been me lying in bed and me fighting to see, speak, walk, eat food and breathe.

I would have wanted to focus my entire creative efforts on the jubilant and rewarding milestones that came at the beginning of my year.

Like going to the beach in January for my birthday.

Redesigning my website in February.

Launching my podcast in March and filming videos for MCS Awareness month in May.

I was also cooking food and
talking on the phone and doing a little yoga every day. What bliss those first few months were.

But if I just went ahead and deleted and denied half my year, I would be erasing an awful lot and probably, a great number of the moments I’m most proud of too.

Standing on the beach in January was important and definitely worth celebrating, but so were the numerous times (even in this last week alone), that I coached myself back from wanting so badly to give up and finding, despite fatigue and difficult circumstances, the courage and the will to keep going. AND … news flash, there was no fancy photograph to document any of that.

My life may not look like the 2021 highlight reels of the people on my social media feed, but that doesn’t mean its any less meaningful or valuable.

Life is not always what we hoped for or what we imagined it would be. Whether moments are deemed good or bad or triumphs or tragedy … they’re all worth acknowledging, they’re all worth honouring and maybe if so inclined, worth compressing into a 30 second, video montage highlight reel and whacking it on Instagram for a bunch of strangers on the internet to see.