When I started my Jessica Mary Robson Instagram account back in 2017, the goal was simple. I wanted to speak honestly about running slowly and navigating my mental health struggles, as a counter attack against the exhausting narrative online that everyone else was fine and everyone else was fast.
I would start my Instagram stories with an honest detailed account of my day and how exactly I was feeling. It was gritty. Sometimes I cried.
The mental health conversation has thankfully moved on a lot since 2017 which means that I personally feel less pressure to show up as vulnerably as I once did. Society is (generally speaking) far more comfortable with addressing these challenging topics in an online forum and that’s been bolstered by celebrities, politicians, sportsmen and suchlike pushing the conversation forward as well.
But even though we’re all a lot more aware of the various ways people struggle with their mental health, there’s still a lot on social media that doesn’t get said or shared. I was thinking on my run earlier this week how I am very much a perpetrator of this selective sharing, too. I find myself choosing to share things that are just a little bit gnarly, but not the really important stuff. Not the stuff that stirs a feeling.
So here it is. My (very cathartic) expose of things I don’t post about.
How bad my anxiety attacks actually are.
When we talk about anxiety online I think we often picture a pathetic trembling, stuttering, figure. Someone who is painfully quiet, perhaps. But that’s not what my anxiety attacks look like. Mine are LOUD and violent, and quite frankly terrifying. Sometimes it feels as though my whole body is on fire and I need to escape it. Sometimes it feels like I will have to scratch at my skin to find a way out of the feeling. Sometimes the lack of breathing makes me feel like I’ll never take a full inhale again. I often have to ball my hands into fists to stop them flailing. It’s ugly and I’m often crying through them. The best way I could describe it is to remember all of the times you felt violently angry at someone or something, and then imagine ALL of that anger being channeled into one massive inward facing tornado of fury at yourself. These anxiety attacks are far and few between for me now, but they really are so much more ugly than social media portrays.
Frequent confusion that I’m on the wrong path.
We have SO MANY OPTIONS. How lucky are we?! But I feel that for me and my millennial peers this creates a crisis that sits between existential curiosity and identity confusion. Should we be having children and buying houses or should we be continuing to work harder to build our pension pot? Is anyone even looking at their pension pot!? (I’m not.) We’re wondering if we should skip the oat flat whites in favour of saving to travel, or whether we should actually consider the environment and never travel at all. I’m no exception to this. I am super content with the path I’ve chosen for myself and I live with zero regrets with regards to where I’m living and the work that I do… but that doesn’t mean I’m also not left wondering if the grass might still be greener in New Zealand, or Bali, or wherever else I’m meant to be dreaming of.
My avoidance of money.
Hinted above at my lack of pension awareness. I avoid conversations about money as much as I possibly can. It’s actually a weird trigger for me, and makes me incredibly nervous. I’ve never been in huge amounts of debt and still the conversation about money can make me start to sweat and feel as though I’ve done something wrong.
The fear of doing something wrong!
Which leads to the next item on the list - I live in constant fear that I’m going to do an almighty f*ck up. You might see an online version of Jess Robson that happily starts a Community Interest Company and boldly sets up the paraphernalia around this to support it… but it comes with intense fear sometimes. Fear that I’ll do the accounts wrong, there’ll be a safeguarding concern further down the line, or that I’m breaking some rule that I didn’t know existed. In fact, breaking rules I didn’t know existed is a common theme for me and is quite possibly something for me to come back to in therapy. (rolls eyes in therapist fees)
Family dynamics
Yeah so I don’t post about family dynamics online either. It feels too exposing somehow. So many of my struggles with mental health will have stemmed from “family dynamics” and yet my inability to confidently share this is baffling. Daddy Issues might well be part of the reason that I was vulnerable to becoming a victim of domestic abuse and stalking, but that doesn’t discredit the fact that the men I refer to (the biological father and the perpetrator) are actually the people at fault - not the girl (me), with Daddy Issues.
How in love I am with my partner.
Why is noone posting about their love life success? I see a lot of openness about the failures of dating and romance, but less positive examples - maybe that’s just my algorithm, but I’m guilty too. At what point did we start thinking it was cringe to REALLY celebrate our significant other online? My boyfriend is great, but he definitely doesn’t get as much air time as he deserves out of fear of being perceived as CRINGE. I did learn recently that the fear of being cringe is what younger people now perceive to be cringey anyway so perhaps I should just go ahead.
I’m running out of time for this self indulgent article but here are some other things I’d add to the list of things I don’t post about, since we’re here:
My fear that I’ll be infertile / too late to have children
My day job
Weeks where it feels like nothing is moving forward at all (maybe sometimes even backwards?)
Perhaps there is a limit.
And perhaps that is the point? None of this NEEDS to be posted, but it's worth remembering everyone's highlight reel has a shadow list just like mine. So next time you're scrolling and comparing your behind-the-scenes to someone else's best bits, know that theirs exists too. Mine certainly does. Maybe I'll post about some of it one day - maybe I won't? But writing it down here, even just this once, feels like enough for now.