You Don't Know Someone Because You Follow Them

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One of the strangest things about being online is how quickly we can feel as though we know people we have never actually met. We see what they wear, where they travel, what they believe, who they spend time with, what they eat, how they train, what they celebrate and occasionally what they struggle with. After enough of those fragments, our brains naturally begin joining them together. Somewhere along the way, a collection of moments becomes a person in our minds.

But I keep thinking about how little any of us really know about the meaning behind what we see.

A photograph can show you where somebody was, but not necessarily why they were there. A sentence can tell you what somebody thought at one moment, but not the hundred thoughts that came before it or the conversation that changed their mind afterwards. Someone can look incredibly confident while questioning everything, or quiet while feeling completely content. Even when somebody shares openly, there are entire relationships, histories, fears, private jokes, disappointments, ordinary Tuesdays and versions of themselves that will never exist online.

And yet we make surprisingly permanent conclusions from temporary evidence.

We decide someone is confident, selfish, happy, attention-seeking, successful, insecure, privileged, difficult, sexual, lonely, intelligent, shallow. Sometimes from a photograph. Sometimes from one opinion. Sometimes because the person we see today doesn't match the version of them we decided existed five years ago.

I think that last part is particularly interesting. We say we want people to grow, but growth is inconvenient when we've already decided who somebody is. A person changes their beliefs and we call them inconsistent. They develop different boundaries and we say they've changed. They discover another side of their sexuality, career, body, relationships or personality and somebody inevitably points backwards as though an earlier version of them is evidence against the person they are becoming.

But surely changing is part of being alive.

I would be more concerned if everything I believed at twenty still fitted me perfectly now. Life should alter us. People should surprise us. Experience should make some beliefs stronger and dismantle others completely. We should be allowed to discover parts of ourselves we didn't know existed and occasionally admit that something we once said no longer represents us.

Perhaps authenticity isn't creating one perfectly consistent version of yourself and defending it forever. Maybe it is being truthful about who you are now, while leaving enough room for the person you haven't become yet.

That is something social media struggles to hold. It gives us snapshots and encourages us to turn them into biographies. But none of us are a photograph, a caption, a job, a body, an opinion or the worst or best thing we've ever done.

There is always more happening outside the frame.

Maybe knowing that should make us a little slower to decide who other people are and a little braver about allowing ourselves to keep becoming someone new.