“I’m erasing myself from the narrative..
The world has no right to my heart
The world has no right to my pain”-Eliza Schyler Hamilton
Those words from the Hamilton Musical as told by Lin Manuel Miranda seered its way into my heart the first time I heard it and has become a mantra of sorts for me as social media has created this new kind of hypervisibility. There are immense social capital rewards to being seen as influencer, to rising to the top of the food chain in the game of hypervisibility and there is a subtle push towards more curation of our lives in a digestible way. Humans have been convinced to willingly become a product in this new era of capitalism that seems to be unfolding before our eyes.
In an ideal world we would not have to commodify ourselves and our lives to have access to the kinds of fulfilling lives we want to lead, but all the branding courses I have taken have taught me otherwise. In my brief stint with entrepreneurship I realized that just doing my work well wasn’t enough, I also had to find a way to create a brand around the work I was doing to make people listen and take my work seriously. This is part of the lifestyle. And going a bit deeper, this pressure and accessibility tends to not only be placed on entrepreneurs but on everyone that wants to participate in our society. Access is exciting, but I often think about what we risk by giving people the authority to visibly approve, dismiss, and critic our lives with the click of a button.
Like any millennial, I love my social media. I found my voice on Facebook. Perfected the art of curation on Instagram. And learnt how to succinctly communicate my point in the 140 characters Twitter limited us to for most of its existence. But 6 months ago I made a decision to permanently delete my 2,500 friend Facebook account and completely erase myself from the narrative. One of my biggest fears is that I am easily disposable, that I will be forgotten because I am not memorable enough. A lie I have convinced myself is true based on half truths and past experiences, but something I struggle with nonetheless, so permanently removing myself from Facebook was a struggle and a deep trigger. Choosing to put regulations on my other social media usage: like taking one week a month off instagram, creating guidelines around private and shareable moments, and really taking the time to audit the people I was following on Insta and Twitter felt hard as well. The process taught me a lot about myself and helped me regain a deep sense of self-power and here is why: when we take away access from the masses, we gain the power to define for ourselves who we are and the power to validate our own lives.
In removing myself from a digital space where people with varying degrees of investment in my own wellbeing felt like they had the right to comment on my choices, I found myself feeling more free to determine if the life I was living was actually the life I wanted to live or the life that would gain me the most validation and applause from the people and place I sought validation from. In learning to sit with my own decision making processes rather than quickly crowd-sourcing for ideas, I realized that I had my own innate criteria on things that mattered to me that are unique to me. This sense of regained power has long trickled down into my IRL life. I am more comfortable setting boundaries with my non-digital relationships because I have experience in boundaries with my digital world. I have learnt to validate the way I look without waiting for comments on a selfie to trickle in to see what other people value about me. I have learnt to remove myself quickly from physical spaces where I feel more shame than support because there was practice deleting, blocking, and unfollowing people digitally.
As women with an already complicated relationship to power, to whom the word itself may not even feel accessible, these small steps to finding what our own power feels like is very important because they give us templates to work with as we continue to smash glass ceilings and embody the kinds of power-fulness we need to feel fulfilled in our lives and relationships. The ability to take ourselves away from spaces, to choose what communities are worth our precious emotional capital, to take away from others’ decision making power over us that we have not consented to them having is what power embodied feels like to me.
Salem is a multifaceted human currently exploring ways to find internal calm in external chaos. She works as a Human Rights Lawyer currently advocating for Transportation Justice, an African scholar centering and amplifying African experiences and African Epistemology. In her free time she writes and podcasts to excavate truths about the human experience. She is a lover of all things self care, beautiful architecture, and intimate conversations. You can find more of Salem at: SalemTeaches.com, BeingSalem.com, Beingsalem.com/self-help-social-justice, https://anchor.fm/storiesandphilosophies, and instagram @Salem_Afangideh