#ChallengeAccepted

The perks of living 6 hours ahead of my home country includes that sometimes I have crazy life changing experiences like waking up one day and found a revolution happened overnight and my social media feeds are full of pretty pictures, uplifting messages and a lot of my girl friends sending me lovely messages, and of course I had 6 hours to plan how would I join that revolution before anyone wake up. The results will shock you!

Today's picture is the default bear that was in the blog template, I pick the template at 3 am in the morning just because of this bear. Sometimes my rules of thumbs are kind of embarrassing, for the template I just said "the first animal I saw will be the chosen one" and here we are.

It was just another casual Saturday night, during a pandemic disease, after lots of social revolutions and fires happening around the world, but you know, another casual Saturday night and out of nowhere a remake of another viral challenge just popped on social media, the idea was to share a very enigmatic black and white picture of yourself, caption it "challenge accepted" and tag whoever challenged you, the idea was to show the world we take care of each other and we are beautiful the way we are. And send it to another 50 girls, but in private because we have to maintain some sense of mystery to keep it rolling.

My first impression was that I didn't understand how sharing B&W pictures of yourself was a way to take care of each other and showing we are beautiful the way we are. My main conflicts were 1. real world changes happen in real world and not in social media so the pictures were not doing nothing in real life 2. I didn't understand all the mystery behind keeping it private and enigmatic 3. everyone posted their favourite (I assume, because we still publish only curated content), more flattering picture with a flattering filter (b&w) and the flattering vibe of support each other so that doesn't really support the idea of embracing that we are beautiful just the way we are, of course I liked all the pictures and contributed their doze of dopamine, serotonin or the one in charge of making social media and likes so addictive. To continue with my doubts, 4. I had the sense that "giving likes" to support each other was a not a very efficient long term strategy 5. it seemed just like an excuse to share a nice picture of yourself (which has nothing wrong, you don't need any excuse to share a picture, go girl) 6. was that only a strategy to make you feel like you are doing something and supporting your friends but in fact you were doing absolutely nothing and just having a shot of "I already did my part, I'm so supportive, #GirlPower #SoFeminist ? What was I missing that everyone seems to support the idea and for me it sounded so shallow and unnecessary?

Then, my very rebellious and deconstructed self attacked, and I started doing some slides for instagram to highlight how unnecessary was the challenge, I invited everyone to be more critic about the whole challenge and connect seriously with their girl friends instead of just liking each other pictures. I let it sink for a while and when I revisited, I noticed it was really mean, to be honest, there was no need to attack anyone because I didn't understand the idea behind, so I was glad I didn't share it mindlessly just feeling that I had to share my deconstructed and mature perspective (my bad). I was wrong, I notice it and I started thinking how could I share the positive part of my ideas and make all this challenge situation a bit more constructive without attacking anyone in the process.

Then all the situation was very clear, the key idea was to connect and support your friends in real life, outside instagram, and by reframing this situation into focus on real life connections everything started to make sense, there's nothing wrong with nurture each other with some likes and "so pretty💖" comments in the pictures, as long as the interaction don't stop there! so the new focus was to invite them all to connect, to continue the conversation, to call your friends, to support their very real life business and I started leading by example and I answer each of all my friends that sent me the challenge and keep having conversations, I received a very positive feedback! real conversations! real phone calls! real support to my friends business! (if you are curios about the slides they are here, in Spanish for now)

This new idea solved some of my doubts and concerns about the challenge, but still more questions than answers, about all the mystery I realised it made sense to keep it rolling and create a sense of belonging (virality 101), about the flattering pictures, I understand from my own process of self-esteem building, that it grows slowly, with tiny dozes of external approval until is big and strong enough to leave the nest and never come back, so it's great they share their pretty pictures and reinforce their own esteem (but keep doing the work, don't just settle with external approval, I'm watching you and I'm here to support you), after some steps in this process you may notice you really don't need a valid reason/excuse to share a picture, just do it, you be you. Finally, as I suspected just giving likes is not a long term strategy BUT could be the first step, I'll take that as a win.

So the only loose end is the sense of "I already did my part, I'm so supportive, #GirlPower #SoFeminist" that can be SO EASILY CREATED BY THESE INTERACTIONS, this is another very long topic to discuss and reflect about. But long story short, like your friends pictures is not changing anything, it is not. Real life actions, the hard ones may change some things, create meaningful connections, support business, create a support network, grow together with uncomfortable and critic conversations and learn about social movements and causes around you may help, that's a starting point for a real change, but is just that a starting point. And of course it counts, a bit of change is better than nothing at all, I'm not saying just don't do anything because is not worth it, but if you really want to make a change and really want to take care of each other we need to asses very hard, very uncomfortable, very exhausting topics that are systemic, that are waaaaay bigger than us, that are abstract and complex and that easily overlooked because they are in the bases of our societies and systemic change is hard AF.

I will just to leave you a great quote of an amazing book I can't recommend more, Doing good better by William Macaskill,

Those activists who campaigned for equal rights for women, black people and the LGBT community were right to do so not because they had a good chance of succeeding in the short terms, but because the benefit was so great if they did succeed.

All the benefits you can think you can create and produce by all those small real life actions are significantly smaller to the potential benefits that a radical systemic change can produce. (I told you the result will shock you, it wasn't just clickbait)

I know this is very hard to digest, I'll let this sink for now but I'll be back with harder, more uncomfortable and exhausting topics such as Feminism, Altruism, Vegetarianism, Climate Crisis, Complex and diverse human relationships, Mental Health and some more. If this text didn't drained you and you have more questions, you want more resources or you want to star a conversation, my email and social media is open to receive all your queries. See you next time,

Annie