Disconnected

I was sitting at home one night, scrolling through Instagram as I ate my noodles and semiwatched a show on Netflix. I suddenly stopped on a photo of my friend, Hailey, laughing with a couple girls in front of the Eiffel Tower. She was studying abroad that semester and I had been living vicariously through her photos. It looked like she was going everywhere, too — Amsterdam one weekend and Berlin the next. It was agonizing to watch her live such a carefree existence far away while I was stuck in my hometown. Her life seemed perfect.

One thing that has become increasingly clear in recent years is the importance of social media in young adults’ lives. It has become a part of our daily routines, the place we go to validate our own experiences. But, when it comes to studying abroad, it feeds us many false expectations, leading to disappointment when we don’t immediately love it in our new host culture.

Social media makes it tremendously easy to show people exactly what you want them to see and nothing else. It allows you to post a photo of your outfit just before a bird takes a giant shit on your shoulder (but make sure to only post that shot on your fake Instagram account, you have a reputation to uphold on the public one). Social media also tends to make us think that studying abroad will immediately change us for the better, but growing mentally and emotionally doesn’t just happen overnight.

Paris is a big city. It’s a lot to take in at once. Moving here, from our beloved hometowns, usually requires serious adjustments. A second-year student at AUP, Isala Gray, says “Living in Paris, you really have to love yourself, because you spend most of your time alone and it’s hard finding people to connect to.”

When I told my friends back home that I was going to study abroad in France, they added to my already high expectations. I naively believed that it was going to be easy, that as soon as I got to Paris I would magically transform into the independent, classy woman I always wanted to be. The reality is, I have dealt with anxiety, panic attacks, OCD and odd phobias for the past seven years. The fact that I believed that I would transform into a new person as soon as I entered France is ridiculous.

What I only recently realized was that I was not at fault here. I was not that naive. This idea was sold to me. This dream of being independent and carefree and classy with little to no effort is sold to us by social media as we scroll past our friends’ photos and think to ourselves, “Wow, I wish I could be in their shoes.” We have no idea how many times they took that photo, shaking their heads with a frown each time they had to look at themselves on their phone.

In “Social Media Use and the Fear of Missing Out,” a research paper about students struggling with “FOMO” (fear of missing out) when it came to studyingabroad, researchers examined the pros and cons of social media and how it can sometimes cause us to feel like we could be living better lives if we were somewhere else. They found that the popularity of studying abroad has grown immensely in the last few years to about 9 percent of the undergraduate population of American college campuses.

Because of this increase in students studying abroad, these researchers wanted to take a closer look at how social media is affecting their time in their host cultures. While social media does have some practical usages, such as keeping in contact with people from home, the researchers found that “this access to knowing what others are doing back home provides ample opportunities for uneasy anxiety-ridden feelings of missing out.” Because of this fear of missing out, it’s easy for more and more students to believe that what they’re looking for is elsewhere. In the end, these researchers found that most of the students in the study struggled with “FOMO” when using social media, especially when seeing photos of friends and family abroad.

Gray explained that she used to “fake the funk” on her social media accounts and act as though everything was fine in order to keep her family from worrying, but her adjustment to Paris was difficult. She recently posted a photo on her Instagram with an inspiring caption about being real on social media and her experiences here. When she first arrived, Gray says, “I thought I was going to be a blogger and dress so cute every day. I haven’t blogged once and none of the clothes I brought work for the winter, so I’m bundled up in everything!” She mentioned that one of her friends commented on her lack of photos of the Eiffel Tower and other Parisian monuments. To Gray, it was funny — if not concerning — that this was what people wanted to see.

As someone who posts on social media regularly and keeps a certain aesthetic, Christopher Turner, a freshman at AUP from Texas, feels the pressures to keep his image up on social media. He explained, “I’m sort of worried that if I don’t keep this aesthetic, everyone back home will say, ‘I told you so.’” The pressure from social media is often reinforced by expectations from family and friends.

An AUP student from Panama City, Ana Sofia Camacho, doesn’t post too often on social media. Because of this, her adjustment to Paris was much different. Camacho primarily struggled with the loneliness of the city. She started focusing on her personal health and happiness instead of the pressures she feltfrom social media, ultimately deciding to post less and limit her time on the applications. Her loneliness grew into a feeling of independence and strength. She stated, “When it comes to being independent, you aren’t really aware of what that entails until you live it. The things that I thought were so easy before, like making my own food, taking care of myself, paying for myself, etc., turned out to be harder than I expected.” As the pressure to keep up an appearance slowly faded, it was easier to really take care of herself.

It’s very easy to fall down the rabbit hole that is social media, and our decisions certainly are affected by what we see online. Social media made many of us believe that our time abroad was going to be easy, leading to disappointment when reality hits. Each one of us has felt like we had an image to uphold at some time, but none of us have anything to prove. The only thing that we can do while we’re abroad is to learn how to take care of ourselves as best as we can while connecting with wonderful people along the way.

BY HANA LOGGINS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAUREN DOMAGAS