It’s a great thing to be able to share our best moments with people on social media, and celebrate our victories, but does the flurry of “2020 you weren’t so bad”, and similarly crafted posts, do a bit of an injustice to – and mask – the personal struggles and hardships that we all faced this year?

If you were to scroll through a typical feed on NYE you could be fooled into thinking that it was almost like any other New Year, a stream of perfect getaways, dinners, reunions, and celebratory moments – and a noticeable omittance of the hardship, job loss, family impact – and days on end of existing in unchartered territories.

Images of us in sweatpants, unedited pictures of our P45s, and photos of us looking miserable with our partners after a row, are all noticeably absent from most timelines. And I’m not saying we should be posting these things, more that it just highlights that we probably never will. After all, if 2020 wasn’t the catalyst for a social media shift, what will be?

In some ways, before Instagram and the likes, it would probably be easier to confide in another person, friend or family member, about any struggles you were facing. But now before opening up we consider it through the lens of both reality – and social media reality.

It feels as though social media has made it harder for some us to potentially talk about how we really feel. After scrolling through endless posts of brunches, scenic walks, the best decorated homes and enviable skin care routines, the last thing someone would want to do is put their hands up to confess that they’re in a tricky situation.

In some senses though, as a platform, it’s allowed us to be more vocal about said mental health issues. We’ve gotten good at being activists for change, sharing posts and resharing our friends posts, and resharing their friends of friends posts, regularly encouraging people ‘talk more’ ‘speak out’ ‘be more open’ on our Instagram Stories – but meanwhile our actual profiles are still filled with edited and glossy pictures that really flaunt our very best selves.

Essentially we’ve created our own seismic whirlpool contrast between never being so publicly open about the topic of mental health itself – while in tandem creating a ‘keeping up with the Joneses Kardashians’ aesthetic and lifestyle that represses us from being authentically open.

If someone is feeling low in themselves you can guarantee that going onto Instagram probably won’t help the situation – no matter how many helpful Instagram Stories they dedicate hours flicking through. Likely it means they will just be met with a flood of posts that are edited and curated in every way – an image of false perfectness that gives the them reinforced doubt about their own situation, and convinces them further of their own perceived flaws.

Again, it’s not to say it’s a bad thing we share our wins but, why do we do such a disservice to our losses and feel the need to conceal all the negative from our social accounts. At the end of the day these are the things that make us a whole person just as much as our wins do. And this honesty might actually just be the key to making us more connected again.