I confess I’ve been struggling with #RotR Episode 6: Forged in Shadow. Maybe it’s the dry Tucson heat (yes, it’s still above 80° F here), or maybe it’s the adventures I’ve been having.
To get the juice flowing, I worked a 4-day video shoot. Theme: Four women adventuring outdoors.
Four days later, I’m still recovering. I’ll let you know when the ideas have wended their way past my limbic brain and into my neocortex.
BECAUSE OMG.
The biggest takeaways?
1️⃣. I’m bad at Insta.
2️⃣. Social media isn’t real.
You can go here to watch me talk about this during “floor time.” (I lifted this term from fantasy author K.A. Doore when I used to hoof it to her apartment and collapse on her floor and she and her wife would feed me cupcakes. Dude, I miss those times. Also, you should go get her books. Fantasy/queer assassins, be warned.)
But I digress.
Instagram. Isn’t. Real.
Once more, because I know this, but obv I don’t know-it-know-it because I’m still wishing I had more followers. I mean, don’t we all, since the first question Emma Watson answers on her interview with British Vogue is…well, I’ll let you go find out.
So, we’re all obsessed, even though we all know Insta’s just an image. They don’t call them “Stories” for no reason.
But you know how things can hit home sometimes? And you wake up and take a breath because you’ve realized something deep in your bones instead of just in your head?
Here’s how it happened for me:
So for four days, you’ve got all these influencers snapping pics and flooding Insta with our badass outdoor lady video shoot.
View this post on Instagram
And I open my app and I’m like holy crap do I look glam. I look beautiful. WE look beautiful. WE ARE AMAZING!
And then I look up from my app. At them. At us.
And the epiphany hits deep down.
The lives I’m always scrolling through and oohing and ahhing and awwwing over—they’re fake.
It’s all fake.
I was there—two minutes ago when the pics were taken—when I took the video of that one girl with her sunglasses on, hanging out the car window like a happy puppy, with the marmalade sunset and bad-wife saguaros flying behind her—I was present, IRL, and we didn’t look that amazing. It wasn’t that awesome. It was actually kind of ridiculous. I worried she was going to fall out the window. She kept scooting farther out so the side mirror would be out of frame. The driver nearly hit a cyclist as she turned right because she couldn’t see through the mirror.
In a word, it was a cluster.
That whole 22-second experience is now memorialized in my 24-hour Insta Story, and I’ll soon archive it for all to see forever.
So here’s my challenge to you:
For the next week, EVERY TIME you open Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or TikTok, whatever, I want you to whisper this incantation to yourself:
“This isn’t real.”
Then touch the karate-chop part of your palm, and say,
“I am real.”
Okay?
Then, and only then, after you’ve grounded yourself against the hot electric depressing shock of measuring your real life against everyone else’s fake ones…scroll on.
Happy scrolling,
River
P.S. Here’s a free, super short sci-fi piece written by my alter ego.