I once knew someone who thought that anything anyone posted on social media was just “attention whoring.” Pictures of a baby? Fishing for likes. Pictures of a cat? Fishing for likes, and also why cats. And let’s not even get into selfies or Instagram or people who have YouTube channels.

Listening to this person talk about social media this way for years, I started to wonder if I was also attention whoring. Did I blog about a trip to Germany so I could look back on it fondly one day, or is this some weird, subliminal humblebrag? Am I posting pictures of the trip because I am just excited and proud of myself for going to Germany alone or am I fishing for likes? I think it might motivate me to play the piano more if I tried to set a goal of recording a cover each month, but if I post a video of myself playing the piano, would I get swallowed up into some Hell-void inhabited by Logan Paul and Black Friday? Would I become insatiable, eventually posting “haul” videos of a trip to Kroger? An instructional video on cooking tofu?

God, I hope not.
OK, actually I’m kind of considering that tofu video now.

Sure, there is a lot of “attention whoring” on social media, but there’s also a lot of people who just want to say their thing, tell their joke, play their song, post their picture. Not because they are living for likes, but because they finally left the house or had a hobby or did a thing and they found it to be a delightful distraction from whatever not-so-fun things are going on in their lives. God forbid someone post a picture of a baby just because babies are cute and much better than someone posting a link from Fox News or whatever. No, no….let’s just label everything “attention whoring” because that’s so much easier than just, I don’t know, letting people enjoy things.

“Wow, Amy, you seem super defensive about all of this.”

I do! If I seem super defensive, it’s because I spent years believing this “attention whoring” theory and I eventually realized that all I was really doing by not posting anything other than cat memes was silencing myself. Maybe no one would have had any interest in anything I would have said anyway, but we’ll never know because I didn’t bother to say it in the first place.

I get to have a voice. Even if everybody think it’s dumb. Even if nobody cares about what I’m saying. I get to have a voice, even if no one “like”s it. I feel like this is an especially important thing to realize as my friends and I approach the age where the world seems to want us to sit down, shut up, and stop taking pictures of ourselves. Don’t you bitches know you’re old? Isn’t there a sale at a Yankee Candle somewhere? Don’t you have somewhere else to be?

Jokes on you, world! We have time to buy candles and annoy you, because women in their forties are very good at multi-tasking.

This seems like an odd revelation to have today, the day that I deactivated my Facebook account, but maybe this is exactly the kind of thinking and mulling over that I was trying to make room for by deactivating my Facebook account in the first place. I need a certain amount of silence in order to hear myself think. I can go back any time I want. I just want to make sure that, if I return, I return with intention.

That’s a fancy way of saying “I want to make sure I don’t spend a whole evening watching videos of chonky cats.” Honestly, that video of the Himalayan jumping over the baby gate? I must have watched that thing 30 times, y’all.