Irina (Coffentropy) – social media, mental health

Larisa: Irina, we’d like to thank you very much for being here and for what you do online. To kick off the episode, could you tell us a bit more about yourself, so that our listeners who may not be following you yet can get to know you?

Irina: Hi, and thank you so much for the invitation! A bit about me: I’m Irina, I live in Cluj, and I think it’s been about five years since I started an Instagram page. Initially, I’ll admit, I started it as a sort of portfolio for my work as a social media manager, so to speak, and gradually it evolved into what I do now, or at least part of what I do now. These days I’m an “influencer”, as we call it around here, alongside the other things I do. Let me tell the story… hang on. I’m a lifestyle influencer, basically, so I document my life online in a way, or at least part of it, and I feel like I resonate with a lot of people. I’ve created this—well, I haven’t really created it—we’re somehow a group of people online who have the same… we’re on the same wavelength, so to speak.

Larisa: Can you tell us a bit more about why you decided to keep the account and turn it into what it is today, essentially keeping it going for such a long period of time?

Irina: I started it as an experiment and, as I was saying, as a portfolio, but after that I started posting things because I noticed that what I was doing, or the things I was posting, resonated with the people who followed me. At first there were fewer of them, and gradually, gradually, more people joined. I didn’t necessarily set out to build a large following; I feel like 20,000 people, which is how many I have now, is a very large number, but I kept going precisely because of the positive feedback I received. People say, or at least the feedback I’ve received is that there aren’t enough voices expressing the reality of everyday life, which can be more boring at times, but is more real and closer to normality, in a way. And so that helped me keep going, keep posting things about… well, more recently, for example, about being a mum. And yes, the positive feedback is definitely what made me continue.

Larisa: Mhm, thank you! And when it comes to social media and perhaps the reasons why you continued to be active on Instagram and YouTube, what would you say are the benefits of having an online presence?

Irina: Online, I’ve met a lot of lovely people, I’ve made friends, and I’ve formed friendships that I don’t think would have happened otherwise, simply through this online connection. I’m not going to deny that there’s also a financial benefit, because I do collaborations with brands, so I’d be completely hypocritical to say, “Oh, I’m all flower power, I’m…” There is a financial benefit as well, I mean, I have paid collaborations, and that keeps me active and excited about what I do. As I was saying, in a way, the community… I wouldn’t want to make it sound too grand and say, “Oh, the community, we’re a community.” We’re all just people who spend time online and somehow resonate with certain things. We’re not necessarily a team, but yes, especially now, I’ve noticed that there are young mums, new mums, around my age or younger, with whom I talk about these topics, including mental health, sadness and joy, and the reality of everyday life as a mum.

Larisa: Mhm. Thank you, thank you so much! You mentioned that on your account you try to talk about the less “exciting” things, so to speak, the ordinary, everyday things, to bring a sense of normality to social media, but at the same time, we can’t help but notice that your social media profiles, the Urban Tale products, and even your home are all very aesthetically pleasing…

Irina: Thank you!

Larisa: We’re wondering how you think this might have influenced your followers’ perceptions, and what advice you would give them from this perspective, given that they’re seeing this very aesthetic, perhaps sometimes carefully curated version of reality?

Irina: Are you basically asking me if it looks too good to be true?

Larisa: In a way.

Irina: I do try to show the less pretty sides sometimes, but whenever everything looks like I’ve “got my shit together” — I don’t know if I can say this word — when everything is fine, I also try to mention sometimes that, look, it’s not always like this. I often appear looking dishevelled, because that’s genuinely what I look like 90% of the time, and the same goes for my home. I always make a point of mentioning that, when you have help, for example, things are completely different from when you’re on your own, and I think that applies… this is true for… not just mums, not just parents, but anyone. When you need help, you have to ask for it, accept it and “use it”, in a way. So yes, I try to communicate that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. I also have a fairly mature audience who understand these things, but at the same time, I wouldn’t want to overdo it and only post things that are, in a way, negative — not necessarily negative, but just the complicated or difficult side of things. Firstly, because I may not feel ready at that particular moment to receive a message along the lines of, “Well, you haven’t even brushed your hair, what are you trying to teach me?” because things like that do happen. And secondly, I wouldn’t want to present it as a… not exactly as an example, but, if we’re talking about… I keep coming back to mums, sorry, because I don’t have any other examples right now, but when you talk a lot about the difficulties and challenges, I’m afraid you might scare people who are preparing to find themselves in that position. So there are several factors that come into play here, which is why I prefer not to necessarily show only the positive sides, but to mention that, again, it’s not always sunshine and rainbows, without overdoing it and posting too much negativity, in a way.

Larisa: Mhm, I understand. It’s somewhat of a fine balance between…

Irina: Yeah, yeah, sometimes when I feel like posting something, I did a story like this at one point… you know how everyone posts those “tap to clean” things, right? And the house was an absolute disaster, so I put up one of those “tap to clean” stories, and the next photo was exactly the same mess. And I was like, “Just kidding, I don’t have time for this.” And that sort of thing, that kind of humour, helps… and the people who get it will get it, while those who don’t, who don’t relate to it, are few and far between, but most of the time they just move on.

Larisa: Mhm, absolutely! We also wanted to talk a little bit about Urban Tale and say that we really love what you’re doing there…

Irina: Thank you so much!

Larisa: Could you tell us a bit more about, perhaps, the inspiration behind some of the designs, or behind the idea of Urban Tale in general? We know there are certain designs that have been particularly successful, such as “It’s never too late to mind your own business” and “Let’s make common sense cool again”, and I think these can also be approached from a perspective somewhat related to…

Irina: Social media

Larisa: Social media, yeah.

Irina: Yes, I’ll admit there’s a very clear connection between these things. “Let’s make common sense cool again” actually came from a very specific place. I think Mariciu had written a blog post when there was some controversy about a woman who had approached a hotel about staying there on a barter basis and doing some kind of post for them… I can’t remember exactly. It turned into this whole scandal where the hotel responded to her with, “Who do you think you are? Let us show you how things work,” and the whole internet blew up because there’s this public sensitivity around influencers who don’t work and things like that. And Mariciu had written in the article that, look, there’s… the guy who owns the hotel has a point and the influencer has a point, but ultimately, common sense is what matters. And somehow that’s where I got the idea: “Let’s…” And then there was also Trump’s campaign — not that I’m a fan of his — but somehow those two things came together in my mind. I made a visual, literally drew it in three seconds and posted it, and it somehow went from one share to another, to another, to another… I thought, “Look, if people like it this much, why not turn it into a product?” So I made the mug, I think I also made a sticker with that message. And with “It’s never too late to mind your own business”, that also came from something online, some situation I can’t remember now, but I thought that if you don’t like someone’s account, or you don’t relate to it, or, I don’t know, you don’t have anything constructive to say — because it’s not necessarily about being optimistic and cheerful and friends with everyone — but if you want to correct someone or say something constructive, that’s one thing, otherwise, “It’s never too late to mind your own business.”.

Larisa: Definitely, yes. We really related to those messages, and clearly a lot of other people did too. We also wanted to ask you a bit about social media and the way young people today use it, alongside the fact that we’re starting to see greater awareness of mental health issues and disorders, and of the fact that, ultimately, we all have mental health. Do you think young people are influenced in some way by social media?

Irina: I was talking to a friend about this very recently, and I said it would be really difficult for me to be a teenager these days, because now, more than ever, there’s this information overload, visual overload, overload of all kinds, and it’s very difficult even for an adult to make it through all of that and find their way to shore, to find themselves, to reconnect with themselves in a way. For someone who’s only just building their identity and discovering themselves, I imagine it must be incredibly difficult not to constantly compare yourself to other people, not to behave the way you think other people would expect you to. I was reading a book, let me think what it’s called… I think it’s “Modern Romance” by Aziz Ansari. It’s a fairly straightforward book, but the idea behind it is that it looks at relationships statistically, at why relationships used to last longer and why they’re getting shorter and shorter now. And the conclusion, spoiler alert, was that we now have access to so many more people, and we’re constantly thinking there might be someone better, someone who’s a better fit for us. We start thinking, why should I make so many compromises and struggle with the relationship I’m in now, when, you know, our grandparents had their village or their small community, because that was all they had access to; our parents moved to cities, went to university and so on, so they had a larger community; whereas we have access to the whole world, and it’s really difficult for us to stop and decide, “Look, this is actually good, I can work with this, here and now, with what I have.” And exactly the same thing can be said about finding yourself, in a way. It’s really, really difficult. I honestly can’t imagine how I would navigate my life in general online these days… yeah, it’s incredibly difficult. I don’t know what I think about it, what… I don’t know if I have any advice or anything to offer. It’s not a very constructive discussion, you see, I’m not… I’m not a guru when it comes to this stuff.

On the one hand, it’s important to find people we relate to and communicate with them, but on the other hand, we find ourselves in this… I wouldn’t want to use the term “bubble”, because everyone says we’re in our own bubble… it’s this constant balancing act between wanting to grow and see what other people are like, while at the same time, you need to build your own personality and establish who you are before you step outside that bubble… complicated, very complicated.

Larisa: It is!

Irina: I think that, at the same time, these days, and perhaps it’s just something I’ve noticed, there’s much more emphasis on mental health and on higher-quality information, and you can find some really good things online if you look for them. The important thing is knowing that you want to find them, because there are some really good podcasts, for example, that can be genuinely helpful. So, as they say, “back in my day, we didn’t have that”, because we didn’t really have internet on this scale, and we certainly didn’t have this kind of support. Yes, we need to learn from a young age how to sift through information.

Larisa: Mhm. And in this sense of filtering through information, given that we’re somehow bombarded with information from all sides and there are all sorts of accounts promoting various messages, how do you think a young person, or any social media user, could somehow make these choices, how can we build a circle of people to follow that is actually high-quality?

Irina: It’s complicated, because I remember when I was a teenager, and I thought that the decisions I was making were the right ones, even though now, looking back, I think “not really”. So I imagine that if you decide that, for example, a hate account is something cool, it’s going to be quite hard to get out of that, although eventually you do. I think it’s important to communicate with people who think in a similar way. I also think that social media could help you in that direction, meaning you could find some people who are like mentors, who you don’t necessarily have any contact with, but whom you admire, and those people usually recommend nice and interesting things, so in a way, imagine what kind of person you would like to become and perhaps follow that kind of person, if we’re talking about social media, and see what they recommend, because people usually recommend podcasts, films, good YouTube channels, articles, books, probably through recommendations.

You see, that’s the thing, the information is there, there’s a huge amount of information, but it’s difficult for us to choose which information is the right information, so we need some direction, and that direction comes from someone who has probably already paved the way or been down that road.

Larisa: Definitely! It’s perhaps a little more complicated given that social media is still relatively new and, in that sense, it’s not a path that’s been as well-trodden, so to speak.

Irina: Yes.

Larisa: But yes, I think it’s really good to, somehow… to try to find some points of reference for ourselves and follow recommendations, if possible.

Irina: Yeah, I’ve recently started therapy myself and, although for a long time I thought I didn’t need it, it’s okay, but I realised, hang on, let me think about how to phrase it… yeah, I don’t know, hang on, I’ve already gone off on another tangent and I can’t remember what I wanted to say, scratch that.

Larisa: No problem.

Irina: If I remember, I’ll say it in another context, but I can’t remember now, you kind of gave me…

Larisa: Sure, I actually wanted to ask you something somewhat related to this, if you’re happy to share your experience with us, of course. We can skip it if you’re not comfortable. I wanted to ask what effect your presence on social media has, or has had, on your mental health.

Irina: I don’t think I’m going to give you the answer you’re expecting because usually when people talk about mental health and social media, there’s a more negative connotation, I’d say, meaning there’s this tendency to compare ourselves or somehow feel bad that, look, we haven’t done enough or we don’t have enough. For me, though, at least over the past year, social media has actually helped me precisely because of the community I was telling you about, meaning the people who follow me. And whenever I became more vulnerable and chose to talk about a more difficult moment I was going through, I would get messages from mums, again, or from people for whom this wasn’t necessarily what defined them, but the issue was related to it, telling me that I wasn’t alone, that there were lots of people going through the same thing, and I even ended up having some very complex conversations at one in the morning with women who were in exactly the same situation, and I didn’t feel alone. Because before opening up about this and before receiving those messages, I felt like it was only happening to me, like no one was talking about these difficult things, the things I was going through, that everyone has their own problems and I felt like I was alone, that I wasn’t enough, that I was doing things wrong, but when you receive messages where someone genuinely tells you, “look, this is what my situation was like”, you try to see things differently, and for me it helped a lot in not completely falling into a really bad depression. So it genuinely helped me, there are a lot of benefits to it as well. What I think is important is that vulnerabilities should still be shared, if you want to share them, when you’re ready to receive the responses you don’t want to receive, like, I don’t know, as I said earlier, “you haven’t even washed your hair, but you’re here trying to teach me about life”, you know. I mean, there has to be a point when you feel reasonably in control of the situation, or you’ve already got through that situation, so that you can use it as an example for other people who might be going through something similar. I don’t think that when you’re hurting the most you need to show your wounds, but there have definitely also been unpleasant moments on social media, especially in the past. I can’t say that I don’t care about nasty comments online because when I get a nasty comment, which is fairly rare, but it does happen sometimes, it bothers me. Then I sit and think about whether they’re right, whether they’re wrong, I keep turning that thought over in my head. Most of the time it’s not about me, it’s about that person and whatever kind of day they’re having. Yeah, and I try not to continue these arguments, these discussions that don’t lead anywhere good for me, because I’ve learnt to protect myself from things like that, quite well actually, from… from gratuitous nastiness, we’re not talking about feedback or anything constructive, and so: block, cancel, delete, block, block, block.

Larisa: Absolutely, yes, I completely agree with that. I’m curious how you see this world where we receive messages and perhaps feel obliged to be available immediately, to respond immediately? We get an email and there might be an expectation that we’ll reply to it instantly simply because we’re available or simply because we can see those messages. Do you think we also need to react to them quickly or instantly?

Irina: Rationally, I’m going to tell you no. You need to set boundaries and make time for yourself, and the world will wait, but irrationally, the way I act very often as well, it gets in my head when I see unread messages and it bothers me, and somehow I want to know that, look, I have a notification-free list, you know, that the emails have been answered, the messages have been read and replied to. I’m working on it, I’m starting to set better boundaries. Now, over the past year, I’ve been managing it much better than I used to because now I actually have priorities or, I don’t know, if I think about it now, maybe I have a more plausible excuse, because before it was simply “Irina is working”, yeah, but now it’s “Irina is looking after the baby”, so I have an excuse for not replying to you. There are also messages like this, I’ve received them a few times and they really bother me, where someone writes to me… they send me a message and I don’t reply within two seconds and then I see, I don’t know, the next day, that they’ve added to the message, “hmm, I thought you cared about your community” or “I thought you cared about the messages you receive, but apparently you don’t”. Or once I received an email, I’m telling you it bothers me, it must bother me if I remember them in this much detail, I received an email from a teacher who had asked me to come and speak to her students during one of their lessons and I was willing to, I’d read the email, but I was getting ready to write a more detailed response, but she managed to reply afterwards, before I did somehow, and tell me, “yeah, I thought you cared, but apparently you’re just like everyone else”. I don’t know what that means, but I assume it wasn’t a good thing and also, “look, you had a fan, but now I’ve unfollowed you”, and I was like, “oh my God, what am I reading”, first of all, but secondly, I don’t like the idea, I don’t like her thinking that I don’t care, because I do care. That’s not what it’s about, and it bothers me when someone thinks that I don’t, but this reprimanding, this approach, I really don’t like it, and this, what do you call it, threat of unfollowing, and anyway I felt… I did eventually write back to the woman with details of who might be able to help better than me, but she didn’t reply, she never replied, she seems to have been very upset with me and… she treated me with the same coldness that, in her imagination, I had treated her with.

Larisa: Yes, and I suppose there are also situations where these boundaries become somewhat blurred between how available we should or can be and, in a way, our personal space, our lives, which aren’t connected to our online presence or to the fact that we read our emails from nine to five.

Irina: Exactly, yes. Boundaries are important, very important. We absolutely have to set them.

Larisa: Yes.

Irina: We need to stick to them.

Larisa: In terms of the past year, given that the international situation has been affected by the pandemic and the lockdowns and related measures, do you think the role or the extent or the way in which social media platforms are used has somehow changed, perhaps especially for young people?

Irina: Hmm… To be honest, I don’t know what to say in answer to that question. I suppose they have changed, given that everything is online now, school and everything. I think the temptation to go from school to social media with one click is pretty strong, and you somehow have to fight that temptation, and I imagine it’s very difficult, because these platforms were ultimately created to keep us there. I mean, there are people who have dedicated their lives, or at least the last few years of their lives, to studying how to make us more attracted to those platforms, and we’re not necessarily super rational all the time to realise certain things, and so we tend to use social media as an escape quite often. And when you’re on a device doing school online, I think making that slip towards social media is very easy, very quick and, in some ways, very harmful, precisely because of those boundaries I was talking about earlier.

Larisa: I was thinking in terms of perhaps this sense of community or the need to communicate, which ultimately underpins everything we do, do you think that the way social media platforms are used has somehow changed, given that perhaps traditional communication hasn’t been possible or has somehow been made more difficult by the measures over the past year?

Irina: Hmm… I don’t know what other people are like, but I’ve missed real-life communication, so I don’t know if we could give it up, and I’m an introvert by nature, so if even I’m being coaxed out of the house by the measures we have in place now, then that’s a good thing, and as for communication in general, with the emergence of social media, it seems to me that… I don’t know if it’s necessarily a bad thing, it’s probably something that hasn’t been studied very much, it’s a shift that, I don’t know, we’re still having these discussions about it now. When do we give devices to children, teenagers, for how long, how do we limit all this time spent interacting with devices, but we don’t know what life will be like in 10 years, in 20 years. I mean, I assume devices aren’t going to disappear, and we do need to.. all the time choose outdoor activities, conversations and face-to-face interactions with people, but it seems to me that now we have… there was, again, this meme on the internet, we speak in memes, saying that young people these days can no longer have a conversation with each other, and it showed pictures from 10 years ago of people sitting on the underground reading books, pictures from 20 years ago of people reading newspapers, pictures from… and so on. I mean, people have always tried to “escape” whenever they can. Social media does indeed make this escape much easier, you’re always… it’s very easy to escape from everyday reality. Hmm… It’s also a good thing because if your everyday reality is rubbish, not all of us are “#blessed” enough to live in big cities or to interact at school, to go to school where we interact with classmates we click with all the time, so social media can also be an escape from what we have at that particular moment, in that particular place, but it can also be very… yeah, nothing is black and white, everything is in this grey area where it’s very difficult to figure out what’s actually going on.

And you know what, I’ve just realised something, what I find interesting is that I’ve… looking at my own experience, I’ve formed some friendships online simply by following, again, people who post part of their lives online and I post part of my life online, and we follow each other like that, not necessarily influencers or people with a large number of followers, or whatever, because I also follow people who have 30 followers, I mean, that really doesn’t matter. But then, when we meet face to face, even if we’ve never met before, there’s none of that cringe of never having met before… it feels like we’ve known each other for a lifetime, like we’ve already seen each other so many times. It’s really interesting how these boundaries disappear, and sometimes people even say hello to me in the street, not as if I were some big celebrity or anything, but it’s this kind of, “hey! Hi, how are you?”, you know? I don’t know the person, but I understand where that comes from because I post, you know… basic, random things that friends would normally share with each other, there’s this sense of closeness sometimes with the person who follows you and yeah, it’s really nice. It obviously also depends on what you want to communicate and what you want to get out of these things, but “the perks”, you know, of being online, can… some of these barriers can disappear.

Larisa: Yes, that’s really interesting. I’m thinking perhaps from the perspective of someone who… say, a secondary school student who has some more unusual interests, I imagine that because it’s so easy to find older people or people with similar interests, social media can somehow be a great help, which was partly the case for me when I was at school, but not really, it was still very much in its infancy, certainly nothing like what it is now.

Irina: Yeah, bridges are built…

Larisa: Mhm.

Irina: It’s interesting.

Larisa: I wanted to ask you something else, precisely because you’ve just told me that sometimes you’re walking down the street and people say hello to you, or you end up having various conversations that… that you perhaps weren’t expecting when you left the house, at that particular moment… on that particular day. I’m also wondering how you manage to maintain this balance between your personal life and your public life, because, as you said, you share a piece of your life. What we see on social media isn’t your life in its entirety, it’s really what you choose to share with other people, and I was wondering how you maintain that balance, or whether it’s something you’re conscious of and deliberate about, or something you do naturally now that you’ve had an online presence for so many years?

Irina: It probably helps that I have an adult audience. I mean, they’re people my age, and so there isn’t the same level of excitement, so to speak, because when I look at, I don’t know, meetups where, say, a vlogger is 18 and their community is made up of people around the same age or younger, their interaction is completely different, I mean, there’s this kind of idolisation of that person, whatever they do at that age. When we’re talking about adults, they’re much more level-headed and more chill, and the interaction between adults is a little different, and as for how I separate my personal life from what I publish, there are things I don’t want to share. We all have them because you don’t want extra opinions, or… you simply don’t want to share them, they’re intimate, private, so to speak.

You only post as much as feels right, because you can… I don’t know whether it’s unfortunately or fortunately, but the more you put yourself out there, the greater the interest, and you tend to, again, we’re talking about boundaries, if you don’t set your boundaries and know how far you’re willing to share, you risk ending up in that uncomfortable zone, both for yourself, and then you really are inviting people into your home and anyone can walk in with their shoes on, muddy boots or… I mean, you absolutely have to set some boundaries, I think, work out how much you’re willing to share and how much you’re willing to hear about yourself, in a way. If you want to, you can share… I mean, if you feel comfortable, you can tell people absolutely everything because there are people who put their lives out there… obviously, they don’t tell you their entire existence either, but you see them there on their stories, dot dot dot dot dot dot dot, every single day, I mean, they’ve somehow been online all day. If they feel good and comfortable, “they do them”.

Larisa: We’re talking about boundaries and the fact that if you feel comfortable, then why not? As much as you’re comfortable with, obviously. I’m thinking again perhaps about a younger audience, someone who uses their account purely for socialising, perhaps within a small circle of classmates and friends, and I’m wondering how they could somehow work out how much is too much, given that at that age, how can I put it, boundaries aren’t necessarily very well formed yet, or perhaps you want to post things purely to generate certain reactions. I don’t know, somehow, if you could go back in time and, assuming social media were as developed as it is now, how… how would you know where to stop, or what advice would you have for someone who wants to have a social media account but is, say, 16 or 17 and perhaps still doesn’t know exactly what they’re comfortable with and to what extent?

Irina: The first thing that comes to mind is to somehow evaluate the feedback and the response to what you post, because if you post a photo and 10 old men reply to you saying, “hey, sexy, let’s meet up”, perhaps it would be a good idea to set a limit on who can view it, just certain things, because Instagram also has this feature where you can select the audience who gets to see it. Probably listen to the feedback you receive, not necessarily directly, because you don’t always get this kind of feedback directly, but if you feel uncomfortable because old men keep approaching you, and I’m absolutely not saying that if you’ve posted a nice photo it’s normal for old men to approach you because it isn’t, but it does happen, either set your comfort boundaries so that only your friends can see it, or, I don’t know, use those viewing restrictions somehow. And definitely block the old men, but basically I think it’s good to go by what you think you’d like to see from yourself, in a way, if you can… just think about it a little bit, not about what other people think, but what you think if you were looking at yourself from the outside, if you were looking at your account from the outside, how would you, I don’t know, “evaluate” yourself, because “evaluate” sounds a bit too academic…

Larisa: How would you perceive yourself, or how would you…

Irina: How would you… yeah, how would you perceive yourself, in a way, if you like what you see, “you do you” as far as anything you post there, as long as you’re not hurting anyone or …

Larisa: We’re now going to move on to the last question I had prepared. Given that

influencers influence, or at least have the power to bring about a small…

Irina: They have the microphone, I’d say.

Larisa: Exactly, yes! Given that influencers have the microphone and that there are many people who listen, who pay attention to the messages they put out there, do you think influencers have… do they play, or could they play, or would you like them to play a role in raising awareness, not just of mental health disorders, but of the fact that we all have mental health, would you like them to somehow take part in this conversation about being more open and talking more openly about our mental health?

Irina: Look, this is where that “it’s never too late to mind your own business” comes in, in the sense that what I would like has no relevance to what other people do, I mean, my expectations are my expectations and that’s where we stop. It’s good in general for mental health to be discussed more, I wouldn’t say that someone who doesn’t feel any connection to it and has nothing to do with it should necessarily talk about it, because it is indeed an interesting subject and a subject of interest, but you also need to have some connection to mental health, because there’s no point in you talking about how important it is to be mindful and go to therapy and build or rebuild your own “self”, and then go and beat children, I mean, there are some things that just don’t add up. So, in a way, everyone should stick to what they have to communicate. And certainly, the conversation around mental health should happen as often as possible, but our expectations and reality don’t necessarily overlap.

Larisa: So you don’t think we should all necessarily jump on the bandwagon… just because it’s a topic that’s somewhat of interest…

Irina: I don’t think so, honestly, and I don’t think that… look, for example, there are political conflicts, or elections, or this or that, and I often notice this tendency to… well, I’m still quite small, or I’m small at around 20,000, if you look at it globally and consider what’s going on and how many followers big influencers have, but people sometimes share messages you say things like… “look, you have this many followers, why aren’t you talking about the elections?”, “why aren’t you doing this?”, “why aren’t you doing that?”. Because they don’t know enough about it, because they don’t want to, because it’s not their vibe, because they have a contract that says they can’t talk about politics, because they have their reasons, they don’t want to, full stop, you don’t have to impose your own ideas on someone else. I don’t know, it’s like walking past someone’s house and saying, “if I had that much money, I’d do my house differently”. You’d do it, but you’re not doing it, I mean, there are some things that… you shouldn’t get involved in… I know it’s tempting, precisely because you see someone’s life and you have the impression that you know that person, and sometimes you connect with them so well that you feel like they’re a friend or someone close to you, and you want to tell them, “hey, look, this is an important topic, come on, talk about it, why aren’t you talking about it?”, but I don’t think that’s the case. Just as we don’t go to our friends and say, “hey, why aren’t you going out into the street to talk about… I don’t know, whatever?”

Larisa: Thank you so much, Irina! We can stop here, but if there’s anything you’d like to add, something you’d like to leave us with at the end, or anything we haven’t covered in the episode, you’re more than welcome to.

Irina: I was reading in a book yesterday that we tend to talk about mental health when it starts to hurt, but we don’t talk about mental health when… as a form of prevention or when we’re doing well. I think it’s important to focus on prevention here too, but real prevention, not buying ourselves some bath salts and having a hot bath. That helps too, but not necessarily, I mean, it’s important not to wait until we have little problems and to take care of our mental health before it starts to creak.

Larisa: Until next time! Take care of yourselves and your mental health!