We are not our bios

A reckoning with the digestible bite sized one-liner

"Package yourself up nicely in 10 words or less!" - the internet.

“Mother of 3, wife of Aiden”

“Fashion, food, and home❤️”

“Pet lover, coffee addict”

“Photographer cofounder @brandnamehere, COO @brandnamehere, financial advice meme page @here”

These bios are a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

But they could be real, right?

On the internet, the few words in our bio pack a big punch. They allow us to package ourselves up nicely into a niche, into a subcategory, into letting the world know who we are in an instant. Whether you’re a business trying to gain social traction, a blogger with a specific set of skills, or just a person on Instagram, these bios tell people who we are, what we do, and what we stand for.

But they also limit us, terribly so.

For the past few years I’ve struggled with my “bio”. I’ve had various bios before.

“Hormones, health, self care and matcha 🍵”

“Recipe developer, runner, will jog for nut butter”

“Dismantling the wellness industry as we know it!!”

These are all bios I’ve had over the last 7 or so years. Right now my bio says “ex-influencer” because that’s how I see myself. It could change though. Maybe I’ll be an influencer again one day? But then I’m not an ex-influencer anymore.

For a long time I primarily used Instagram to build my business. My life was a series of paid posts advertising brands and I just continued to share my life. It really was a wild trip. I felt like I was going nowhere with it. I kept posting as if, but I felt incredibly frozen in time.

I shunned other parts of myself and my personality away and amped up a small part of me that presented well on the internet. Even though I did my best at sharing vulnerable sides of me, it was still, just one part of me.

Even when I tried bios that attempted to stab at the multilayered aspect of human nature:

“Multifaceted human being”

“A human, just being”

to me, they still came off as disingenuous. It was too woo-woo out there for me. Because of course we are human beings, when did the world become so that we had to remind ourselves (and others) of that? There is soooo much more to us than a 140 character bio, our jobs, our relationship status, our online subculture niche. And get this: we are sooooo much more than what we choose to share online. Even people who attempt to share every aspect of themselves online are not showing it all. It’s humanly impossible. Reality is right in front us, in real human interaction, in the nonverbal cues, the body language, the fights, the make-ups, the moments spent in solitude, the things we do when we no one is looking.

But unfortunately - the multidimensionality of humanness doesn’t do well online. It doesn’t perform. It’s too messy. It’s too much for us to handle. It’s not digestible.

So when I woke up to what was happening to myself, and stopped presenting this wellness girl, this easily digestible piece of me, it went sour. I wanted, so badly, to be seen as more. Over the past few years, using Instagram off and on since the wellness portion of my chapter ended, I’ve felt at times, lost on Instagram. Without this strong purposeful bio, who am I? Who am I without my bio? And it’s spilled out into other areas of my offline life, too. It’s made me realize how I put all of my eggs and self-worth into this basket, my online identity. It was my primary source of validation for so many years.

I feel I’m in a portion of my life where I am relearning how to live semi-normally without this one thing driving my entire self forward. The identity shift that came from walking away. I had, and I have, no guidebook on how to do that. It was freeing, and very very scary. And I’m still re-learning every day. Learning what I want to have out of this life. Remembering what brings me joy. Learning to have balance, to find meaning, to share that with others when I feel ready.

More soon.