Amelia Knott

And I think online especially, we forget that because social media collapses context.

We forget that there's a whole person on the other side of a screen, even when it's ourselves on the other side of that screen, right?

Yeah.

So asking those questions about our intentions, I think, is an invitation back in to remember our humanity, right?

That we're all looking for validation, approval, that it's not a crime to seek attention.

It's actually just really, really human.

And I think shame flourishes in isolation.

So sitting alone, looking at that post, just like,

cringing and spiraling out isn't great.

But one way I think of mitigating that is maybe sharing it with someone who knew you at that point in your life or someone who knows you really well now who sees the wholeness of you and understands what was going on for you in that moment and that it wasn't just the stupid hat you chose to wear or the brooding playlist or whatever cringy thing it was, right?

So bringing somebody else in to witness it with you I think also goes a long way.

I think so, right?

The advice to try and do an audit of your digital footprint isn't actually all that useful, right?

The record of us online is pretty hard to scrub completely.

So I think it's kind of like being a person with just like a lot of tattoos.

You're probably not going to love the one you got when you were 18, right?

And instead of thinking of it as, oh my gosh, I'm in this prison of my own body with all these dumb images, thinking about it instead like, I have this record of a time and a place and what I thought was cool, what my aesthetic sensibilities looked like, what was important to me at that time.

And it's like a scrapbook.

But if we hold everything we've ever said and everything we've ever posted online to...

The standard of our values in the present, the sociopolitical context we exist in, we're going to find things to cringe at every time.