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Our global, digital society is already closer to a Black Mirror-esque reality than we’d like to accept. So much of our lives are lived online. Hours are spent carefully curating, tweaking and maintaining our online presence and identities, promoting ourselves as brands. How many followers, likes and comments you have correlates to having a good day and your self-esteem levels – because here, perception is everything. Forget even being the person you project yourself to be online, on social media you are your ideal self as our real selves continue to dwindle in the midst of social validation, fans and promotions.
We’ve become spoilt for choice. It can be an incredibly empowering thing, but we also end up making these choices to cater to our unreal selves. Keeping it aesthetic, sexual; but also making sure your ‘rebelling’ is part of the larger acceptable be-alternative-and-not-politically-correct narrative where tokenism and shock value for the sake of followers and headlines are more important than real changes in society and yourself. Today, we’re far more open-minded than we’ve ever been as a society, but it is still very selective. Social media has connected the world in many ways but also created a generation of alternate realities where we everyone looks perfect and travel to beautiful places, post pictures and fitness goals. Behind these facades, our dirty laundry starts piling up – the everyday life of our real selves, with all its ups and down, fancies and follies. But the more we hide this, the more it grows.
Through a #100daysofdirtylaundry Instagram series, 28-year-old Kaviya, going by the handle @Wallflowergirlsays, uncovers all the uncomfortable and cringe-worthy dirty laundry that she’s had piling up. It’s the cliched identity crisis that triggered the thought behind the project, she tells Homegrown over via email. “I was a passive consumer of social media till last year who infinitely scrolled past post after post of friends, acquaintances & strangers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Post after post of filtered, touched up selfies, exotic vacation check-ins, high-res photos of avocado salads and the perfect, witty, fabulous lives everyone was leading,” she writes.
“Only, the entire online experience felt so constructed and unreal. Social media had become our generation’s playground for constructing alternate identities of how we want to be perceived by others (as popular, as stylish, as cool, as intelligent) rather than who we really were. It’s unreal because once you remove the rose-tinted glasses of social media, you see the other side of the forever-online generation not many speak about - the taboos, the anxiety disorders, issues with body images, the complicated relationships, manic materialistic binges,” said Kaviya. She realised just how strongly she felt about it, starting off this project to address the lesser-spoken side of our digital, material lives. Without any real training in the arts she started off with a lot of self-doubts, but with a whole lot to say. “As expected, the project has been pretty uncomfortable to do, from overcoming self-criticism to realising that being vulnerable and real is very hard, to toeing the line between ‘this dirty topic is too personal to share online’ to hoping I do not come across as preachy.”
She addresses uncomfortable and unwanted aspects, ticks and traits of life and there is definitely at least one that we can all relate to. A step-by-step guide on ‘How (not) to bottle up grief’, ‘first world problems in a third world country’ or women and farting – the artist covers a range of emotions and experiences, critical commentary to light-hearted fun and is definitely a series we all need to see, but considering the subject matter, not everyone is comfortable with such reality checks. One one hand, Kaviya has had strangers from across the world writing to her about how relevant the project is, how brave she is for speaking about certain taboos and on the other hand, she’s had people closer to home question the nudity in the art and “what purpose airing my dirty laundry to the world solved.”
“I have had many women from outside India, interestingly from countries like Pakistan, Brazil reach out saying how much they related to the work, it makes one realise that whichever part of the world you belong, the range of emotions and experiences most women go through is pretty much the same,” she says, highlighting one of the positives of social media – connecting people through experiences across the world to great a global community of empathy, understanding and support.
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