SAD! This Woman Has Hundreds of Mid-Run Selfies But Isn’t on Social Media So All She Can Do Is Walk Around Showing Them to People on Her Phone
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Diane Arbus loves to run, and she’s not shy about posing for photos—two activities that the 42-year-old attorney often combines, holding her phone at arms’s length during her runs to snap a selfie, or posing for a lighthearted pic after a workout.
It’s a habit the avid runner shares with many others, but with one tragic twist: She does not use social media. As a result, she has “probably a couple hundred” of mid-run selfies and no easy way to share them with strangers.
“It’s hard, yeah,” Arbus says. “I understand that most runners share their selfies on Instagram or in Facebook groups or wherever, but I walked away from all social media years ago.”
“It’s been great in a lot of ways,” she adds, “but it’s hard not being able to publish my running selfies, you know?”
Arbus says she often shows her photos to her husband, but notes that “he’s just one person, and honestly he never seems that interested.”
Beyond that, she says, she sometimes resorts to showing total strangers her photos, directly from her phone screen—a practice that, she says, can be awkward at best.
“Sometimes after a run, if someone is walking by or whatever, I’ll pull out my phone and just laugh really loud,” she says. “And if the person looks up, I’ll be, like, ‘Oh, sorry, I just cracked myself up looking at this goofy selfie I took during my run—here, see for yourself.’”
“And then I’ll rattle off some stats while I show it to them, like, ‘4.6 miles, 8:44/mile average pace,’ something like that.”
Usually, Arbus says, the stranger smiles politely and moves on.
“It’s a little weird, I guess,” she says. “But not being on social media, what else am I supposed to do?”
Arbus says she’s experimenting with other ways to share her pics that don’t involve one-on-one interactions.
“Maybe printing them out and tacking them up on utility poles, like people do with flyers,” she says. “Or community bulletin boards at laundromats and places like that.”
Asked whether she’s ever tempted to rejoin a social media platform, Arbus laughs.
“I hear that almost every day,” she says, “from my husband.”
