Matilda Green UNFILTERED
Beauty secrets, embracing motherhood and being real in a social media world.
From the outside, Matilda Green’s life looks like a fairy tale. She met her prince, Art Green, on TV’s The Bachelor, got married and now has two children, a boy, Milo, 3, and a girl, Autumn, 5 months.
Living the good life after trading Auckland city for a semi-rural lifestyle in Warkworth, they couldn’t be happier. Green, 31, agrees that life has been pretty good so far. She often wonders what her life would be like if she hadn’t gone on The Bachelor. Most likely she’d be climbing the corporate ladder in media. Instead, the media spotlight has swung onto her life – and mostly that has been positive, though there have been times when Green has copped some flack, which she is learning to take in her stride.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Obviously everybody has, but mine have been pretty public,” she says. “I find that if I turn off my phone and don’t look at any media, then it’s not there. I just take a break from my phone, have a breather, take a couple of days to ground myself, then deal with it. That makes all the difference in terms of negativity on social media, because it’s really stressful. If there’s an online angry mob coming after you, it can feel very overwhelming.”
Green’s way of processing is to think about what has happened and what she can learn from it to evolve as a person, “because we’re always evolving”.
“We take our mistakes, we learn from them and we grow as a person and that’s life. It’s just a shame that now in the society that we live in, people’s mistakes are online forever and there’s nothing you can do about it,” she says. “That is just something that we are going to have to deal with and say, ‘okay, well I know that I have grown and evolved since then’. And, the people around me know too. At the end of the day the opinions of your family and friends matter, not people that don’t know you. [The opinions of people on Instagram] are actually invalid because they have an opinion of a few photos on Instagram and a few videos. And that’s not a whole person. That’s the thing we should remember.”
Letting go of façades
Green is not afraid to be goofy on the gram. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, which is partly what makes her so likeable. But in recent years, she has recognised that being a people-pleaser has been a key theme throughout her life.
“I grew up being quite a people pleaser. I really wanted to be liked and it’s only in the last few years that I’ve tried to let go of that and figure out who I really am without other people’s validation,” she says.
“Because Instagram is such a big part of our lives, I wonder subconsciously, have I sort of moulded myself a little bit to be this version of me that I think people want me to be? So I’ve done a lot of internal work in figuring out exactly who I am without anyone else’s opinion and what that looks like.”
Just be
What she has realised is that she doesn’t have the energy to be a people-pleaser anymore, especially now that she is a mum.
“I’ve got a very small amount of spare energy because all my energy goes on Milo and Autumn. In my spare time, I just want to be myself and have fun, and to do what I want to do,” she says. “I want to nurture myself and I don’t want to have to be a certain version of myself or have to keep up any façades.”
She wishes that everybody was a bit more real sometimes and not so worried about having the perfect this or that.
“I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on Instagram to balance out the highlights with the lowlights now. Because social media is shoved down our throats all the time, it’s distorting our view of other people’s lives because people only want to share happy moments, which I think is completely natural,” she says.