I Tried Really, Really Hard to Romanticise My Life
If you have TikTok, and I’m going to guess that you do because I honestly don’t know anyone that doesn’t, chances are that you’ve seen at least one video of aesthetic candid/sneak peek videos set to music that sounds like something straight out of a fairytale. If the person who posted it is conventionally attractive, rich, and/or lives somewhere so beautiful that every clip is jaw-droppingly breathtaking, it’ll probably be viral. There were a few trends recently, “romanticise your life videos” set to the ‘if only you knew what goes on in my [pause] mind’ and the ‘swing lynn’ sounds especially, that let you add 25-35 videos and auto sync them to let your followers catch little glimpses of what your life looks like.
I love these videos. I love the ones people make showcasing their gorgeous homes, the ones with the ocean and sunsets, ones about holidays and city trips, and even ones where people just pick the last 25+ videos in their camera roll to see what it looks like. I tried the last type and failed miserably; it was a messy mixture of pretty sunsets, my cat running around the house like she’s been possessed, videos from nights out where it was so dark you can barely see anything, and clips of various places in London.
It wasn’t at all what I’d wanted it to look like.
Then I had some sort of weird existential panic that I should do more pretty things- not for TikTok, but because maybe I was missing out by not seeing all of these aesthetic things in person. The EL&N café in London looked stunning and I think I’d seen the Sketch bathrooms from every angle on Instagram. I took myself on a day out to London and climbed St Paul’s Cathedral and saw a show at the National Theatre, but it was raining and windy and miserable the whole time. The few videos I took of the view from the rooftop of the cathedral and the National’s stage were overcast: definitely not the sort of thing I see in those pretty TikToks. I got one video on the train home of the pink(ish) sky, my hands- shaky from the cold- almost ruining it, before accepting that this day wasn’t going to look the way it had made me feel.
And that was when I realised what that thought actually meant.
I had felt happy all of that day, even as I’d realised how unfit I was climbing the cathedral’s 500-odd stairs. The TikToks where everything looks stunning always made me feel like I’d love it if I got to experience living in the moments from each of those videos, and maybe that was what I’d been envious of. I think, unconsciously, we feel like even when we’re in a happy moment, we could be happier if we could somehow prove why to other people.
If I showed you the dreary, grey videos from the top of the cathedral there’d be nothing inherently stunning about them, but conquering my fear of heights and getting to see London stretching out for miles and miles beneath me made me feel so joyful. Maybe if I had been standing under a watercolour sky, you’d be able to see why, but I wasn’t- so you’ll just have to take my word for it!
by Holly Berry
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(also featured in I04)
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