A lot of unreasonable\u00a0things give me anxiety like using household\u00a0cleaners, going to the grocery store, or saying my own name, but last night I\u00a0really was ashamed of my panic over something so trivial: changing my Facebook profile photo.<\/p>\n
Since back to the\u00a0days of MySpace, a\u00a0profile picture has been a\u00a0sort of update on where you’re at in life, and a way for others to make judgments about you.\u00a0The picture you chose\u00a0probably falls into one of these categories: a recent\u00a0photo of yourself where you think you look fantastic, you doing the coolest thing you’ve done lately, a testament\u00a0to being in a relationship, recently wed, birthing a baby, or just being excited that\u00a0you have someone who is OK with you putting\u00a0them in your profile pic, or an oldie but a goodie that some times disappears but always comes back like that damn pimple on my chin.\u00a0Either way, this inch by inch thumbnail really\u00a0shouldn’t speak as loudly as it does.<\/p>\n
I\u00a0prefer\u00a0to make well calculated profile swaps. My most recent change-up was to a photo of me and my mom to pay tribute to her on Mother’s Day and to make up for not\u00a0sending her a present, because c’mon what greater a gift is there than the inclusive in one’s profile picture? I revisited this photo\u00a0last night now that Mother’s Day is long gone,\u00a0and\u00a0I wasn’t that psyched on it. So it was time to make a move.<\/p>\n
I have a photo of me and Mike at my cousin’s wedding last\u00a0weekend which was sure to get lots of mom likes,\u00a0family and friend likes, and people who just love to like love. But after\u00a0I committed to posting, to my horror, the photo was blurry. Now everyone saw that I posted a photo I thought I\u00a0looked good\u00a0in, even though it was blurry (many people do this and I do not condone it). So I immediately deleted it and hid it from my timeline, although\u00a0I’m not sure which one of these erases it faster or if both are even necessary, but I \u00a0knew that whatever I did it was already out there and someone saw it. I also\u00a0knew that someone would now see the posting\u00a0madness\u00a0that was about to unfold. I tried posting\u00a0it again, cropping it in hopes of less blur, but nope. Now\u00a0I had put the same blurry photo out there in the social universe twice with a different crop. Oh crop.<\/p>\n
I was\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0person. That person who was trying too hard. That person I wanted to seem not to be but there I was frantically being that person. I always picture that person as recklessly updating their profile picture naive that people are watching them in their conquest for a picture perfect profile.\u00a0I was having a public profile meltdown.\u00a0Delete, hide, erase. OK it was gone, but now I was just the default shadow girl with her overgrown bowl haircut. What now? I had no other photo on deck. I felt the time flying by as my vacant profile sat there mocking me, showing the world \u00a0I had no great photo, no life event, no elephant I\u00a0fed in\u00a0Africa. I had nothing to share.<\/p>\n Finally, I found of photo of my best friends and clung on to them, like I was in the photo, and I posted. This photo was also blurry but\u00a0it wasn’t\u00a0the “I think I looked good in that crowd so I cropped out my blurry face” blurry, but the “we’re\u00a0at a bar at night having fun” blurry so I\u00a0committed. Now I can’t help but feel like I should be committed. At least I look fun in my profile pic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am incredibly ashamed by all of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5274,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[86,169,347],"class_list":["post-4121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bottomless-whine","tag-anxiety","tag-facebook","tag-social-media-meltdown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bottomlessmimosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}