Instagram Isn’t Real Life: Why You Need To Have Relationships With Humans 7 Feet In Front Of You

One of the healthiest things I have done for myself is reclaim myself and dissociate, even as a non-fiction writer from my art.

I am not my art, I am Janne.

Living in the cabin on the Sunshine Coast 5 years ago I only knew 2 people. One of them lived an hour north and I was working with and the second was a friend of my mothers. In that time I threw myself deeply into my writing, learning about social media and starting publishing my writing with Elephant Journal.

I went from living and working in the service industry where I knew a 100 faces in the room to being alone in a cabin trying to learn how to cut kindling and walking around with bear mace because yogi bear kept tearing the siding down off my cabin.

I was alone up there. I threw myself heavily into social media and found connection. I found a social life here. I also found my writing voices in that sweet micey cabin, and an ability eventually to let go of being lonely and just be alone.

But it was out of balance. I felt too close to the screen.

I identified deeply with what I was sharing on there and felt like it was me, because it was slabs of my heart.

This served me in giving me great motivation to share and build my business but sometimes threw me off my center.

Instagram is not real life. And my writing is also not who I am. EVEN though I share slabs of my heart for a living—I am a full breathing, heart beating woman over here.

My poetry and my art are meals that I cook. I go to the grocery store and prepare them with olive oil and stir them and serve them to the world.

But at night, I turn the light off and tuck myself in—me, Janne.

Sometimes I and we forget that because we are living in a world where we are so inside these screens.

This morning I was an anonymous sleepy human at Nectarine Grove who was so out of it I couldn’t put two sentences together and fumbled awkwardly socially with the guy working the till. Then I spilled matcha on my white dress and fell in love with the puppy, Cody, at the table next to me. He was a wild thing and his mamma was eating and I offered to walk him around the block. We went for a walk and he was kinda anxious and sketchy and barked at a bunch of people and pulled and I felt self-conscious that people were judging my dog was an untrained basket case and quickly gave the dog back.

This morning an Instagram while I was living this life a photograph of me in Costa Rica where we filmed “I am a woman of distinction” went up with a poem beside it.

I had an intensive with a client this week and we were talking about a book she is going to birth, and we spent time in detaching from how that book does or what it means.

The book is a dinner on a Tuesday night, and you and me are the humans who wake up brush our teeth, take morning shits and forget to take the recycling out somedays and scramble outside hailing the recycling truck driver like she’s god.

I want to remind you, actually this isn’t even my advice. This is advice from Miguel so I might as well quote him, “Instagram isn’t real life. Have relationships with people 7 feet in front of you.”

You are not what you do, you are who you wake up with in the morning.