2 LIVING ON LIKES

“Hey, girl! I would love to get together with you next time you are in town. I have just started selling (fill in the blank), and I just know you would LOVE these products! I would LOVE to send you some samples and see if you like them. Would you do me a favor and go like my page and tag 5 friends who might enjoy this amazing opportunity, too? I appreciate any push you may be able to offer my team. Also, I am making more money now staying home with my kids and thought you might like this opportunity to create the flexibility for the life of your dreams. You would be a great member of our team. Think about it!”

Look here, Morgan, I have not heard from you since 1992. But yeah, I will look you up next time I am in town. I am sure we have a lot in common these days. Let’s don’t pretend you and I are something that we’re not. What you are really saying is, “Hey, girl. I need you to drink my Kool-Aid and start an auto draft each month out of your bank account!” Can I just Venmo you twenty dollars and call it a day? Will that work for you, Morgan?

I would rather ride on the back of an overflowing garbage truck on a steamy August day in the South than ride on that multilevel networking train.

If you are part of a multilevel marketing network, I wish you all the best. I wish you nothing but success and prosperity with that thing that you feel is best for your family. I just wish you would stop messaging me.

I think the biggest oxymoron on the World Wide Web right now is a “twenty-one-year-old life coach.” Are you kidding me right now?

Oh, you have a whopping 600 followers and are making a killin’ doing this life-coaching gig? Who, may I ask, are your clients? I’ll be sure to hire you next time I need to get unstuck with choosing a college major—psychology or mechanical engineering—to keep my parents off my back. Or when I need to learn how to balance my checking account, I will look you up, oh wise life coach. You are the knower of all things at the ripe old age of twenty-one.

I have birthed two giant babies, birthed one giant divorce, and gathered myself by the bootstraps to make a new life in my forties, but I will be sure to hire the life coach who has successfully launched her business from her fully furnished room in the Chi Omega house. Here, take my $250 and help me find my best self, would ya?

Social media’s likes have given us a false sense of security and success. Are we all just dwelling in a false reality now? A Chi Omega who thinks she is changing a world that she has yet to even experience. Or the stay-at-home mom who has tied her soul and identity to a cosmetic brand that is sweeping the globe, yet I see her in the aisle at Walmart with Oil of Olay in her shopping cart.

The whole world has witnessed us all acting like plumb fools for likes. The Tide pod challenge almost killed you people. The Kylie lip challenge gave every young girl in America a big ol’ mouth hickey, and the “In My Feelings” challenge was the 2018 version of a Chinese fire drill. Been there, done that. If Kiki has any sense, she will hop over that console and put your pedal to the metal and leave your tail right there in the middle of the road. Then there was the condom challenge. What? Why anyone would want to stick a condom up one nostril, deeply inhale, and then pull it out of the other nostril without trying to gag and puke is beyond me. Yet YouTubers were accomplishing exactly that for views and likes. I can’t even with you people. Lest we forget the challenge that started them all: the ice bucket challenge. Look here, Brandi, you ain’t fooling no one in your little white tank top with the new girls propped up on (cold) display. I’m pretty sure your ice bucket challenge had nothing to do with supporting ALS. Can you tell me exactly how much money you raised to support that medical research? Naw. But you sure had plenty of folks researching your own medical interventions.

When the likes showed up unsolicited on my filter-face video, the whole world (or what felt like the whole world) started commenting on my life. Then Miranda Lambert shared one of my videos, and I died a thousand deaths. The likes spiked, and in an instant I had more likes than I knew what to do with. The likes came pouring in. Each morning and each night, thousands more. The likes sparked the demand for T-shirts and coffee mugs and shows. A new reality was presented to me within weeks. I was living in a new reality. People were liking this stuff. People were liking… me?

Shortly thereafter, the dislikes started rolling in. Except there is no thumbs-down for disliking something on social media. So the dislikes come with words and emojis. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this is serious soul-searching business. Every day. Putting myself out there online for public review. Thank goodness my skin grew thick in my childhood, mostly from snow cones, but I learned early on that a stranger’s negative words have no power over me. I learned to give it no power. Call it out. Bury it and move on.

But now I am in the business of entertainment, living on likes. Except the difference is I know that the likes are not life at all. They are moments in time. Nods. A nod here and a nod there. Those nods may buy tickets to one of my shows, or they may not. Those nods may share one of my videos, or they may not.

My favorite kinds of likes are the ones that go the extra mile and come to my in-box. Like the one from a shirtless man with an ’80s mustache. He refers to me as “hot babe.” Every sentence has “hot babe” in it. “Hey hot babe. I miss you hot babe. Can’t wait to talk to you hot babe.” OK, eww. Put a shirt on for your next profile picture, man. I am not going to entertain this nonsense, but he persists, and the messages keep on coming. So do his nipples.

Then there are the messages that come to my in-box with heart-wrenching stories of overcoming adversity and illness. Those likes come with purpose, and I am forever changed by them. Messages that encourage me to keep on making people laugh and give a bright spot to an otherwise dark day. The pinnacle of the likes is when I get to meet one of those in-box stories in person at a show. The likes show up in the flesh. Except for the shirtless man—my whole team knows to be on the lookout for that joker. It is a complete circle that makes me realize that the little thumbs-up button comes with a story each and every time. The thumbs-up from complete and total strangers make this work meaningful. Not my stories from the ob-gyn or the checkout line at Walmart. It’s the followers’ stories. The stories of cancer, depression, grief, addiction, sacrifice, and redemption. Those are the stories that deserve the likes. All of them.

Last Christmas, my thirteen-year-old daughter asked for a lighting kit so she could start posting makeup and skin-care tutorials on Instagram and YouTube. STOP THE MUSIC. I mean, who doesn’t love a twenty-five-minute dissertation from a young girl who has just contoured her face, with what can only be compared to pancake batter, to create cheekbones while breathing heavily into the microphone. This is all that I could envision would happen when she made her Christmas request.

As her mom, of course, I was proud of her entrepreneurial spirit and her desire to invest in her own interests. As her mom, I was also scared to death for her self-esteem. She is a spirited young lady who has never shied away from attention. But I worried about the likes. She has been protected from public school, where kids learn to sink or swim. She has been somewhat sheltered from those pressures and allowed to grow up closely snuggled against Mama Bear’s chest. Thirteen is a soft, fragile place, where the desire for belonging is raging out of control. My job as her mom (and her dad’s job) is to serve as her compass. Helping her find her North Star—which direction she is to travel to know who she is and whose she is. My job is to help her stand firm on a foundation that is built from feelings of safety, security, and belonging. Her Instagram tutorials were short-lived, but I foresee them resurfacing in the future in some capacity. Perhaps it’s the criticisms in adolescence that give us the chance to teach our children what’s out there doing harm.

My hero, Brené Brown, says in her book Braving the Wilderness (and I believe social media is some folks’ wilderness): “Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world.”

When I was going through my divorce, I found myself searching and scouring social media for things that had the potential to hurt me. I was like a homeless person rummaging through the trash every day, not for survival, just rifling through trash for any trace of evidence. Clicking on anyone’s profile who might have something negative to say about me to my soon-to-be ex. I was looking for pictures that didn’t include me. I was looking for clues of how he would attempt to live life without me. I was looking for our friends who might choose to walk with him through the divorce instead of with me. I was looking for ways he might blame me. I was looking for a perception he might try to paint of me. I was creating false stories and scenarios in my head and determined to make myself a victim. I WAS NOT A VICTIM. I WAS A VICTOR. I had fled with my two children and found us a place of peace where our family could heal and thrive. I WAS A CONQUEROR. Yet I continued to search through the trash day in and day out. I was unknowingly searching for something that would hurt me, until a friend said these words to me:

“Heather, what are you going to do if you find what you are looking for? Are you going to confront him and make yourself look absolutely ridiculous? No.

“If you find something that upsets you, does this change your course of action? No.

“If he says just the right thing online, publicly for strangers to read, is this going to salvage your marriage? No.

“The only person being hurt by this searching is YOU. The only person suffering here is YOU. The only person who can unfollow and change what you see and have access to every day is YOU. It is hurting no one but you. So get yourself together and start unfollowing these common denominators. You can friend them again in a few years when the anger has cooled off. And who the heck cares if they know you unfriended or unfollowed them; you aren’t around to hear them talk about you. Most people do not have the courage to say to your face what they say behind your back. So for now, CLICK THE BUTTON, HEATHER.”

This is exactly what Brené Brown meant in her book: “We don’t negotiate our value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation.” I was looking for someone to tell me I didn’t belong. I was looking for someone to hurl insults at me. I was looking for the snarling, good ol’ New Testament gnashing of teeth and casting out of demons. I was looking for judgment because I thought I deserved it. I was looking for my own identity since mine was unsafely placed in a marriage at a young age. Lo and behold, marriage turned out not to be the foundation on which someone’s identity should be built. (That’s a topic for a whole separate book, but I hope you all can incorporate that into your Sunday-school lesson this week for all the young girls to hear.)

Powerful clicking, unliking, and unfollowing. What freedom it gives. But please, don’t announce to the world that you are cleaning out your online friends. Walk in maturity. This is not for show. This is for you. This is your power. Don’t hand it back over to their opinions. I love the “I am taking time off from Facebook” announcement that plants seeds in others’ minds. Oooh, maybe something happened, or maybe she is wise beyond her years. I wish I had her strength. NO! Stop all of that. Go in peace. Go in silence.

The beauty of the social-media world is this simple fact: WE HOLD THE POWER IN OUR HANDS. We have the power to decide whom we follow and what we follow. (Except Siri. She is clearly in cahoots with the Home Depot and listens for you to mention a new barbecue grill, and then all of a sudden, those ads from the Home Depot’s Fourth of July sale show up in your news feed—I am not talking about that. Hey, Siri, why don’t you mind your own business, mkay?)

I took back the power I had given to so many people for too long. Their posts were interrupting my workday, interrupting my recovery, and eventually would interrupt my reconciliation. When you can take a step back and identify the behaviors (online or not) that keep you in a place of pain, that is the first step on the road to freedom. Recognize it and move on. You can take back your power. If I can, you can.

Perhaps it was those moments that prepared me for this career as a comedienne. I have the ability to overlook the negative trolls online who pounce on my material when it posts. I have the ability to give the right kind of power and emotion to the likes. I know their place, and I know their role in this online dance that we do.

People like me for how I make them feel when they watch the videos. People don’t like ME. They barely know me. Women like me because I give them a reason for a girls’ night out to come to a show with their girlfriends. The husband likes me because he likes hearing his wife laugh for the first time since she lost her mother, so he buys her tickets to a show. The truth is, what you are liking isn’t me; it’s what you know of me. It’s my sarcasm that you like. You like my ability to say what you are thinking about the folks who post about their CrossFit workouts or the things you want to say to the crazy baseball moms. You might not even recognize average ol’ me in the grocery store if you saw me. Yes, I still have to go to the grocery store and do laundry and pick up my kids. The likes didn’t change any of that. The likes didn’t change my joy or happiness.

I once read some very wise advice from Mark Cuban, the Shark Tank billionaire who owns the Dallas Mavericks. It was 2016, the Powerball lottery had reached an all-time high of $1.6 billion, and America was going crazy. Everyone was talking about it. Your hairdresser, the grocery-store clerk, the preacher, your grandma… everyone.

Cuban was interviewed and offered up his advice to the soon-to-be billionaire; he said, “If you weren’t happy yesterday, you won’t be happy tomorrow. If you were happy yesterday, you are going to be a lot happier tomorrow.”

I know that I hit the like jackpot in 2017 and the years following—it was the right post at the right time (woulda been nice to hit that $1.6 billion, though). The likes that drive my business do not drive my happiness. They are simply a marker that I am doing something right. If you asked my children how many people like their mother’s Facebook page, they’d have no clue. I have no clue. My parents have no clue. Ask my manager, because she is the only one who definitely has a clue! Waking up with hundreds of thousands of likes on my Facebook page didn’t change me. The likes didn’t make me someone I am not (a sarcastic Southern sweetheart—wink). The likes just changed my path. They just changed the trajectory of my career and the way I will provide for my children. Our belonging is not up for negotiation based on how many followers we have. Our value is not determined by the comments section. Our value comes from deep within.

Here’s a story from an unknown source:

There is a legend that the ancient gods were discussing where to hide the secret of peace and joy. They did not want humanity to find it before they could appreciate it. They had a great debate about where they could hide it. One of the gods suggested, “We should hide it at the peak of the highest mountain.” After some discussion, it was determined that it would be found too fast. They also discussed the deepest forest, the deepest sea, and the hottest desert, all with the same conclusion. Then the wisest god stood up and proclaimed that he knew where to hide it. He spoke slowly and calmly. “Hide it in the human heart. That is the last place they will look.”