Largescale political events are pivotal moments on social media platforms. While they put information affordances and governance structures to the test, they also unevenly disrupt the mundane rhythms of digital storytelling that unfold on social media every day. For “ordinary” social media users, event-based disruption can produce intense emotions and furnish opportunities to situate oneself within unfolding narratives of political change. This dissertation examines how U.S. American citizens experienced two major political events—which have proven to be disruptive in different ways—through the temperamental lens of social media platforms. It also investigates the social media practices that citizens used to navigate, celebrate, and avoid political disruption. Through a qualitative multi-case study of the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic, this project explores and delimits junctures of politics, identity, and everyday life online. It is dedicated to defining how political events and everyday life clash and coincide from the perspectives of networked citizens. These points of friction come together through personal and political considerations of event authority, temporality, and magnitude. This project is also concerned with constructions of self and identity amid political events. The concept of mediated self-making serves to connect interrelated yet largely unreconciled frameworks of digital selfhood—such as self-presentation, self-representation, and self-expression—to explain constructions of self within a constantly changing and increasingly algorithmic digital media landscape. Each of the two case studies draws on a different observational and interview-based digital method, attuned to its distinct event characteristics. The election case involves sequential feed analysis interviews that examine participants’ social media feeds at three different time points during the election event, and the pandemic case incorporates scroll back interviews that examine participants’ social media profiles as retrospectives of their personal pandemic histories. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that the work of managing symbolic boundaries between “self and other” and “everyday and event” is highly intertwined. The social media practices that people use to weather political disruption serve to shape collective definitions of identity and group membership. In turn, this project interweaves scholarly work on digital selfhood and politics to invite new inquiry between them.