Performing Success: Black Identity, Social Media, and the Exhaustion of Keeping Up

Social media has done something interesting to the relationship between Black identity and success. On one hand, it has created spaces of visibility, community, and cultural celebration that were less visible in the mainstream. Spaces where Black excellence is named and celebrated on its own terms, not as an exception to a white norm. On the other hand, it has created a new kind of pressure: a curated, highly visible standard of Black success that is available to anyone with a phone, at any hour, and that is very difficult not to measure yourself against.

For many Black people in their twenties, thirties and early forties (generations that came of age alongside social media rather than before it) this pressure is a significant feature of daily life, even when it is not consciously registered as such.

 

The particular quality of Black social media success

The images of Black success that circulate most widely on social media have a particular quality. They tend to be aspirational in a specific way: the successful marriage, the entrepreneur, the executive, the creative. People who have built something on their own terms and whose lives look like evidence that the system can be navigated, beaten, or bypassed.

The complexity, the difficulty, the cost of getting there - these tend not to be so openly broadcast. What circulates is the arrival at the point of success rather than the journey. And for the person scrolling who is somewhere in the middle of their own journey (not yet arrived, not sure the destination is as clear as it looks on the screen) the effect can be a particular kind of inadequacy due in part to the fact that the images of success being held up are of people who look like you.

 

When community becomes comparison

Social media communities built around Black professional identity and Black success can be genuinely nourishing. A source of connection, inspiration, and the sense of not being alone in a particular kind of experience. They can also, when the relationship with them becomes unconsciously comparative, become a source of chronic low-level stress.

With Black peers online appearing to succeed in the same spaces with the same constraints that you may be facing, it is easy to feel that any difficulties you are experiencing are personal rather than structural. That if you were more disciplined, more strategic, more willing to hustle, you would also be ‘there’.

 

Identity under construction

For Black people who grew up with social media as a significant presence, questions of identity and authenticity have a particular texture. The self that is presented online and the self that is lived privately are not always the same self. The gap between them (between the curated relationship or professional identity and the more complicated, less certain private experience) can be a source of psychological tension that tends to increase rather than decrease the more we invest in the public ‘performance’.

 

Self reflection

There are some questions worth asking yourself: what does success mean to me, and what (or who) is my success actually for? Is the version of success that I am pursuing one that was genuinely chosen by me, or one that was absorbed from my environment (social media, family expectations, or community aspiration)? And also, did these environments define what Black success should look like before I had the opportunity to define it for myself?

 

What therapy can offer

Therapy can offer a space to ask those questions away from the public gaze. It also offers the opportunity to think about identity, success, and belonging in a way that is genuinely exploratory rather than measured against an external standard.

Therapy offers the space to notice and narrate what you actually want, rather than what you have learned, or been socialised, to desire.

If you are tired of constantly trying to keep up, with an image, standard, or a version of success that may look right from the outside yet feels more complicated from the inside, therapy may provide the reflective space that you are searching for.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.