May 16, 2025

Secret Good Things

Last October, I had a mammogram, and I didn’t tell anybody. Not out of shame, or secrecy, but instead out of a fit of subversion. Because of social media, there is now a template of how we’re supposed to perform these things, maybe a hospital gown selfie, or a waiting room shot, and there’s even a script for how the caption should go, and I just didn’t want anything to do with any of it, and this is how I’m feeling about putting most of my life on the internet these days.

Which is how some people have felt about putting their lives on the internet since the beginning of time, perhaps most wisely, but it’s a departure for me, someone who’s been putting myself out there since I started my first blog 25 years ago this October.

25 years, which is more than half my life, and almost the entire span of the century so far, enough time to know that everything is always changing, whether it’s the internet, the world, or me, and the best thing about my blog is how it has captured all of that movement I might not have noticed otherwise: who on earth was that girl anyway, just post-teenaged, posting angst filled pop culture lyrics on her Diaryland site, which, blessedly, remains only accessible via internet archives if you know where to look? How was the damask wallpaper installed on my Blogspot blog ever considered aesthetically appealing? Who was that lady yammering on about Mommy bloggers before she had kids? Or the one who wrote about how she’d finally got her anxiety under control in a lovely post dated February 2020 (and ha-freaking-HA)?

For a long time, I considered social media to be micro-blogging, and it came naturally to me, I figured, because I’d been blogging for so long. I counselled people about the advantages of living life online—it’s a way of showing your process, making connections, being human, an exercise in authenticity. Which I think was true with blogs, and maybe it still is (blogs are fundamentally obscure; well-known blogger is an oxymoron), and I continue to show up on my blog and be more honest and curious and sometimes messy there, just because of my confidence that almost nobody is reading and so I’m not performing anything.

But it’s different on social media, these platforms underlined as they are by algorithms, the dreams and whims of billionaires, and a tendency to indulge everybody’s worst tendencies.

It was the Black Lives Matter black squares that did me in, back in June 2020. And perhaps this was my old-school blogger ethos showing, but the murder of George Floyd was a occasion that called for extreme thoughtfulness and introspection, work we had to do in our minds and our bodies instead of performing in public by rote, adding a black square to your grid because it was expected. When blogging began, doing what everybody else was doing was anathema to the project, and instead we were supposed to provide our own perspectives, the kind of “take” that no one else could offer, nothing general about it (and not necessarily a “hot” one either).

And it was the pandemic too, the way I felt it necessary on social media to perform my values and politics around everything, which seemed important because the stakes were so high—literally life and death, and preventing our health care system from being extra-overwhelmed, and encouraging the normalization of public health measures—although this compulsion was also a manifestation of my anxiety (amplified by the cacophony of voices I’d encounter online and was desperate to synthesize) as well as an awful lot of pressure to put on one human person (and eventually, that pressure broke my mental health).

I’d long supposed that social media could be an exercise in immediacy, in paying attention, and living in the moment. On Instagram, the insta was the point. I’d also thought that the benefit of a life that looks cool on Instagram is that you end up with a vase of tulips on your kitchen table and delicious meals at a good restaurant that you get to eat once a photo is taken. The pressure to show up on social media can push us out into the world, make us try new things, and go to new places, and I’ve been selling myself this idea for a long time, but for me—on social media at least—it eventually ceased to be wholly true.

It was when I would be someplace beautiful and thinking more about how great it would look on Instagram than actually being there that it began to feel icky. Or if I’d failed to get a good shot, or had no photo at all, and it seemed like the moment had been wasted. The overwhelming pressure I’d feel to include a record of everywhere I went, and everything I ate, and everyone I saw, because otherwise, it was like none of these things had even happened. And I’m going to say that I experienced some of these same pressures back when I was avidly scrapbooking my teen years before the internet even existed for me. Possibly this is a ME problem, instead of a problem in general, but it definitely was a problem, and a habit that I had no idea how to break.

Contrary to what I’m saying here, I actually have good boundaries when it comes to the internet. When I go on vacation, I never look for a wi-fi password. My phone goes to bed a couple of hours before I do every night. I don’t have a good data plan, so I don’t have access to the internet much of the time when I’m out in the world, and these are choices I make most consciously. But it was still not enough , and I’d have to push it further. I was tired of feeling divorced from the moment, and as though I were living my life for an audience. Authenticity is a fine thing, but I was feeling as though I were constantly submitting to scrutiny. I was also exhausted by a politics that was demanding this or that, us or them, just a further entrenchment of divides that were already so dangerous. This was around the time I started adding “avid human” to all my online bios, instead of a series of hashtags. It was an assertion that I, like you, contain multitudes, and that the work I do in my own head and in my own community might be far more important than anything I happen to be inputting into the billionaires’ algorithm machines (substack included!).

This post I wrote at the beginning of 2024 was the beginning: “In 2024, I want to be more thoughtful…and keep more things—more the joy and the pain—just for me, and the people in my life.” Slowly, slowly, I made progress. At the end of the year, I’d removed Instagram from my phone.1 I’d kept my mammogram private, just to prove this was possible.2 I performed good deeds and people did nice things for me, and it all happened even without being broadcast. I went out for dinners that you don’t even know about. Sometimes I was happy or I was sad, but you didn’t hear about it. Other times, the sunlight fell on my table in such a way, but the point was to notice it, not to hold it. I can read a book and not follow with any kind of response, if I don’t feel like one. I’ve not posted a somewhat unflattering selfie of me in a swim cap for months now, even though I go swimming every day. I went to see the cherry blossoms at Robarts Library, and only posted a photo four days later—which in cherry blossom time is actually 760 years.

I keep thinking about Shawna Lemay’s 2020 post, “Do Secret Good Things,” and what it feels like to have some tricks up my sleeve, instead of letting it all hang out there for everybody to see. I’ve become more comfortable with not controlling the narrative, or even (and more importantly) feeling I have to. Moments happen, and I let them (I say, as though I have any power otherwise). And I’m feeling so much better for it.

The danger of this, of course, being that now I’m just performing my cessation of performance, that this is more of the same, that I’m as show-offy and self-satisfied as I ever was. I don’t think I am (I waited this long to tell you about my mammogram—surely that stands for something), but I don’t know, and maybe that’s the point.

I don’t know, and I don’t even have to.

(This piece first appeared in my Enthusiasms newsletter, which is the Pickle Me This Digest. If you’d like to receive a copy of my newsletter in your inbox every month, you can sign up here!)