The Stories Behind the Pictures

My Days on Social Media Are Nearing an End

I’ve finally gone and done it.

I’ve deleted my Twitter account and my Facebook Author Page. I still have an Instagram account and my personal Facebook profile, but they’re next.

My days on social media are nearing an end. It was never a matter of if, only when.

Back in 2018 I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon with a raised phone in my hand. The tiny 3x3-inch picture on my phone could not capture the full majesty of the canyon.

I had to put my phone away and just stand there before a vast open space. I could feel the warm breeze on my face and the heat of the sun on the back of my neck. I could hear the birds sing as they swooped between the time-tested trees. And I knew I could share this moment with my family who were with me, but I couldn’t truly share it with thousands of others online.

The pictures on my phone were nice, but reductive at best.

To partake in this moment of awe and wonder required physical presence.

More recently, I shared a couple of pictures of my fiftieth birthday in the Cayman Islands (which is where I took the picture of the sunset featured at the top of this article). The trip was fun, and I appreciated the kind birthday wishes online. But I’ve continued to think about that post because one could look at those pictures and assume my life is all sunshine and roses. But there’s a story behind every picture.

That’s part of the problem with social media; it’s good at creating a sense of reality that feels, well, sort of unreal.

Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but they cannot ever tell the whole story.

Most stories are both-and. They are both hard and good.

I’ve been thinking about the stories that aren’t ever told on social media. Maybe some are never shared for good reason, but other stories are likely kept in the shadows because we know they’re not the kinds of stories people “heart” on Instagram.

So, the contrarian in me wants to tell you more of the story behind those pictures on Grand Cayman Island with a glorious sun setting behind us on the Caribbean Sea.

When Jeff and I were 18, we hadn’t met each other yet, but neither of us were dreaming about big, bright futures, much less fancy trips to the Caribbean. We were too busy just trying to survive.

Survival was our only aim because we were each stepping into adulthood with extreme brokenness in both of our families of origin.

Between the two of us, we came from homes entrenched in generational poverty, unemployment, multiple moves, domestic violence, serial infidelity, alcoholism, drug abuse, pornography, gambling, ongoing hospitalizations, death, divorce, and parental remarriages, or worse, parents with live-in boyfriends or girlfriends.

Most of our childhoods were spent in constant crisis mode.

By the time we met in our twenties, we knew that neither of us had been given any kind of blueprint for what a healthy home should look like. We had no pattern to follow, no role model to emulate. And in addition to the dysfunction we were raised in, we — like all of us — brought our own sinful patterns with us.

The chances of us building a healthy beautiful life together were slim to nil. 

The odds were against us.

But we don’t believe in odds.

We believe in God.

And he changes everything.

This is our story.

In truth, it has taken us a long time to own our story — the whole of it — because we each spent decades trying to flee the brokenness we came from to write a new story for our own family.

We fled from what was, like refugees from chronic trauma, to write a better story.

In some ways Jeff and I have been able to build much of what we dreamed of, knowing it is all a grace: college education, long-term employment, a stable home, and most of all, a solid family to call our own.

In other ways we are still working out what it means to live in the middle class. We recognize the many ways we are not like our middle-class peers as we still experience a different kind of poverty almost every day.

We have never had extended family to help us raise our kids. I can count on one hand the number of times Jeff and I had a family member watch our kids so we could go on a date. If a car breaks down, we can call each other or Triple AAA, but we have no extended family to call for help. We spend Christmas Day together, the five of us, and it is always nice, but it is never with grandparents and rarely with any extended family at all. And this was true even before we moved to the East Coast.

In so many ways our life together has felt like it is us against the world. There is no safety net to catch us, no support network we can rely on. And we sense, deep within the marrow of our being, the profound lack this has wrought.

Because, despite the house and the 401(k) and the masters’ degrees, we still experience a deep abiding loss, like an underground current running beneath the outward visible parts of daily life.

We live every day with a different kind of poverty: a poverty of family, of close relational ties, and of a history we can look upon with dignity.

But we have each other. We have our kids. And we do have a few individual relatives, spread across the many miles, we love to connect with.

More than anything, though, we have a faith that sustains us.

There is One who sees all things and knows all things. There is One who gathers the orphan and the abandoned and places them within a family (Psalm 68:6). There is One who grieves the losses with us, but then also restores us and re-stories us.

All of this grows in us a living hope and a new vision. To be the change. To give our kids the foundation we never had. To provide for them. To be there for them. And to build a new history. However imperfectly we can.

So, whenever I’ve shared a post on social media of a lovely home or a fun vacation, it was always real. But you likely haven’t known some of the other stories behind the pictures. You haven’t known the struggle and the pain that have also been a part of the journey.

My guess is, this is true for a lot of the posts we see on social media. We see the shiny parts, but we rarely know the stories behind the pictures.

There is always so much more to every story — yours and mine.

There is both the hard and the healing.

It is both-and.

And it is Grace.

The main reason I have stayed on social media as long as I have is obvious: publishers expect it. But I’ve come to expect something more of myself and my writing.

I want to write both-and. I want to leave behind the pictures and the posts that are inherently reductive, and I want to write more in long-form so I can share both the good and the hard. This may not always be pretty. But it will be more three-dimensional and hopefully more real.

I’m not writing this to convince anyone they need to delete their social media accounts. That is a personal decision, and the timing will differ for each of us. And it’s not as if I’m logging off forever. I’m actually just moving online. I’m moving from short-form posts on social media to long-form writing here on Substack.

If any of this resonates with you, I’d love for you to stick around and share some of your experiences with the way the stories behind the pictures are sometimes left in the shadows.

I’d love for this space to be a safe place where we can be more real about the both-and.

Shalom.

Denise

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UPDATE: A short while after publishing this piece, I deleted (not just deactivated) my Instagram account and my personal Facebook profile.

I am now officially off of all forms of social media. Not for a break. Not for a detox. But for good. And it’s been really good.