Westover northeastern commencement
Award-winning author Tara Westover urged Northeastern University graduates to look beyond their superficial online personas and celebrate all parts of themselves that technology can’t capture in a commencement speech Thursday night.
“It’s a concept that I’m going to call ‘the un-instagramable self,’” Westover said. “Everything of any significance that you will do in your life will be done by your un-instagramable self.”
Westover grew up in the rural foothills of the Idaho mountains with a radical survivalist Mormon family whose belief system barred schooling. Nevertheless, at the age of 17, she set foot into her first classroom at Brigham Young University after teaching herself mathematics and grammar and graduated with honors in 2008. In 2018, she published her memoir, “Educated,” which details her climb towards higher education and quickly became a New York Times bestseller.
On the night of her own graduation, Westover told the crowd gathered at the TD Garden in Boston, she uploaded three photos of herself standing alongside her mother and father in a cap and gown to Facebook. But, her smiling face in the photo hid different emotions.
“I wanted them online because they showed my life as I wanted it to be, rather than as it was,” Westover said.
Westover said her graduation pictures showed a different reality as to what actually happened in the lead-up to the ceremony. She outlined four things she remembers about that day: It was her first-ever graduation, up until the moment the pictures were taken she was alone since her parents missed the ceremony, a flight to the University of Cambridge was waiting for her, and she no longer identified with the Mormon faith.
“Faith was the rock I’d built my life on, and now that rock was turning to sand before my eyes,” Westover said to explain the doubt she felt during this turning point in her life.
Doubt and negative aspects of life are covered up by many through a “virtual avatar” persona, Westover said. Westover said she fell victim to following this fake persona when looking back at those three smiling photos on her Facebook profile.
“I came to identify more with the woman in those pictures than I did with my actual self,” Westover said.
Westover said that using an online persona to present an idealized, crafted version of ourselves can be a form of self-rejection. In addition, identifying more with this manufactured persona can harm a person’s self-esteem and distort self-perception.
An estimated 69% of adults in America use social media, according to a 2021 report by the Pew Research Center, and 70% of users reported experiencing depression, showed a 2020 study by the Cureus research group.
“Sharing a self is not the same thing as having a self,” Westover said. “I think that when we deny what is worst about ourselves, we also deny what is best.”
Westover urged graduates not to get consumed by the perfection the new digital age demands and to realize that living in the moment and learning from their mistakes is perfectly fine. But, still, she didn’t discourage them from throwing their caps in the air and smiling for the camera.
“But tonight, as you upload that photograph, take a moment to check in with your un-instagramable self — and thank them for getting you this far and for taking you the rest of the way,” Westover said.