Why I Quit Hashtagging My 100 Happy Days

Before I begin, I want to make it very clear that I don't have any issues with anyone else who does this challenge.  I think it's great.  I think it's got a good goal and is decreasing world suck.  Please, please don't take this blog as a criticism of the challenge.  I just want to explain why it wasn't a good challenge for me.  And it's not because I'm pregnant.  Which I'm not.

A brief run-down, gentle readers:

The #100happydays challenge is an online, pre-set goal for its participants.  Clicking the link will bring you to the challenge's website with a more detailed description of this quick oversight.  Basically, participants agree to take a picture of something that makes them happy every day for 100 days in a row.  They share each picture daily on the social media platform of their choosing, including the hashtag #100happydays (so the challenge creators can follow it) or a similar hashtag of their choosing.

I saw this challenge and jumped at it, all but foaming at the mouth.  You may remember (or not; I don't know how important remembering the banalities of my life is to you) that a couple of years ago, I made a similar challenge for myself, which I lovingly called OGTAD (One Good Thing a Day).  I wrote a short journal entry about something good pertaining to my day, every day, for an entire year.  I had started that challenge for myself because I was in a very unhappy place in my life and was looking for anything that would help me find some sort of light.

So when I saw a one hundred day picture challenge, I was excited.  100 days, compared to my previous 366?  Piece of cake.  A quick snapshot taken on my phone instead of a page of writing?  Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.  Sharing it on any of my SMS, to which I am already so disturbingly attached because I love oversharing?  Bring it on.  I immediately made myself an instagram account (a SMS I had previously been blatantly ignoring) and started hashtagging away.

By the end of the first week, I was kind of stressed out.  By the end of the second week, I was just plain unhappy.  So after Day 14, I quit.

I had complained to a couple of people about wanting-not-wanting to quit, because apparently, 71% of people quit because they "don't have enough time."  I did not want to be part of that statistic.  And I don't actually consider my failure, though I'd rather not call it that, to be included in that 71%, because it certainly wasn't for lack of time.

Here's a list of reasons why the #100happydays were making me unhappy.  But, to be fair to the challenge, these are MY OWN ISSUES and are definitely NOT issues with the challenge.  So for every point of mine about why the challenge didn't work for me, I'm including a counterpoint as to how I could have avoided it to continue on with the challenge more happily:

• Instagram:  Why did I choose to jump into a daily challenge by using a platform I had never experienced before?  That was probably my first mistake.  But I didn't want to be blasting these pictures on facebook, where I felt they might get annoying.  (I don't know why I thought a daily picture would be less annoying anywhere else.)  Do I actually think other people's daily pictures are annoying?  No.  I just have such a big issue of projecting on other people that I feel like ONLY my daily pictures would be considered annoying.  Narcissus, meet your reflection.
• I could have made my account private.  I could have submitted the photos to the website itself, and then no one would have had to see them.  I made a bad platform choice for myself, even though the challenge offers ways to avoid this.

• Hashtags:  I had never used a hashtag before, not even ironically, until my first picture on Day 1. It kind of made me feel uncomfortable.  Sometimes I tried to be funny, and sometimes I just tried to hashtag how I thought I was supposed to hashtag, but clearly, I'm slipping into a generational gap or something, because I just don't like them.  I feel silly, and the sillier I felt, the sillier I tried to make my hashtags, but I just feel weird about them.  I don't know.
• I only had to use the hashtag #100happydays.  I was not obligated to come up with any other hashtags besides that one.  I didn't have to use them at all, if I had just sent the pics in via email to the website.

• Tangibility: I felt like all the things that made me happy during the day had to be something tangible... otherwise, how could I take a picture of it?  If my favorite song came on the radio, how was I suppose to express that in picture?  Should I take a picture of my stereo... while I was driving?  Should I write down the lyrics and take a picture of them?  You see where I'm going.
• As noted above, there are clearly options of how to overcome the tangibility/intangibility issue.  I was probably just being lazy and bitter towards the challenge.

• Immediacy:  This was one of the most frustrating issues that I had.  I felt like I was constantly having to be on the lookout for something (tangible!) that I could hurriedly take a picture of in order to get that picture up and make my day count.  I'd be eating a piece of chocolate at noon and think, "Oh, my God, what if this is the happiest thing to happen to me all day?  I better take a picture."  Then, an hour or two later, I'd see a pretty flower and think, "Does this make me happier than the chocolate?  I better take a picture."  And so on.  Soon, my phone was full of stupid pictures of things that were kind of pointless, and I felt like I was cheating because I was saving up all these happy moments, making them competitive, instead of just picking one to post. 
• Immediacy, Part 2:  Let's use an actual example from my instagram: Michael and I went out to eat at the Blue Crab one night.  That made me happy, so I took a picture of the menu and posted it with my happy hashtag.  An hour later, as we were eating, the sun sank into a gorgeous sunset, which some of you may know can make me happier than just about anything.  I loooove sunsets.  But I had already posted my happy picture, so I got this feeling like I had wasted it.  And that is not the point of this challenge.
• I know it's called Instagram, but that doesn't mean I couldn't have taken part in the fascinating subculture of the latergram hashtagging.  The competitiveness I felt between storing up my happy moments or "wasting" one was a product of my own internal frustration.

So what does that all come down to?  I was stressed out, every day, trying to seek out happy moments instead of just letting them come to me.  I was hoarding them, or trying to make normal things seem extra happy, enough so that I could post them and feel like I could mark off the day.  

When I was journaling, I didn't worry about anything.  I would get to the end of my day, sit back, and reflect on everything that had happened.  I could write about one good thing that stuck out to me, or about multiple things.  I could write at my leisure, and no one else had to be annoyed or bothered by it. I didn't feel like I was sticking it in anyone's faces.

The challenge made me more miserable than happy, and ultimately, that was why I quit.  Does this mean it's a bad challenge?  Absolutely not.  It simply wasn't the structure that I personally need to identify my happiness.  I know how to do that for me, and it was my own fault that I tried to force myself into a box that I should have known wouldn't fit me.  Could I have struggled along with it for 100 days?  Of course.  But the goal is to be happier, and I am definitely happier without having to worry about hashtagging it.

Walking the Line Between "Yes" and "No"

Here's the problem that constantly wages war inside my head: I am, first and foremost, a people pleaser.  I am also very fearful.

So what does that mean, and why is that a problem for me?

As a people pleaser, I constantly feel the need to say "yes."  I want-slash-need people to like me, and I want-slash-need people to tell me that.  God forbid someone thinks poorly of me.  It's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night as I analyze every detail of every single thing I did for the entire day, picking out my worst moments and replaying them endlessly.  I think about things I did weeks, months, years ago and relive them all in agony.  I'm a perfectionist, I'm a people-pleaser... and I'm exhausted by it.  I want to do, say, and be the things that will make people like me, for whatever reason.  Whatever drives this need is still a mystery to me that I'm trying to solve, but whatever it may be, it's there.

On quite the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm kind of not awesome with interacting with people, which makes it all the harder at getting people to like me (or FEELING like they like me).  I fear change.  I hate being outside of my comfort zone, which is teeny-tiny to begin with.  I'm an introvert, have been my entire life, way before Buzzfeed and tumblr and social media in general felt the need to tell me all the ways I could identify this about myself.  It's almost like they're trying to make it a cool and desirable thing to be, so, score one for Erica?

But what this creates for me is this terrifying torture of being caught between "yes" and "no."  I desperately want to say yes, but I am constantly drawn towards saying no.  And whatever decision I finally decide upon always feels like the wrong one.  Yes, once I get through it, I usually tell myself I'm glad I picked whatever I did, and I learned whatever I was meant to learn, but honestly, it's an exhausting process.

I'm trying, really hard.  I'm trying to say yes more often to the things that frighten me, and I'm trying to say no more often to the things I know aren't in my best interests or worth my anxiety.  I really am trying.  Please forgive the shakiness in my voice and any hesitation I might have prior to giving you an answer that scares me.

This has been a pointless post by yours truly.