Last month I deactivated my Instagram. I'd been wanting to do it for a while now, but I kept putting it off, hiding behind the excuse of needing a strong social media presence to benefit my acting career. After months of waking up everyday day wrestling over the decision to upload a picture or remove my account, I finally got to the point where I'd had enough and took it down completely. There were a couple of different issues that led up to this decision, but the two that really pushed me to the limit was my sudden awareness of my obsessiveness and lacking self-esteem.
If you know me, you know that I'm quite "particular" to say the least (I'm "high-strung," "high maintenance," and have a "princesses complex" to say the most). The obsessiveness came in two-fold. This first way it manifested was through me overly prioritizing the aesthetic of my theme. In the beginning, curating my theme was an innocent form of artistry. I didn't care if there was something random in the background of one of my photo's or if I had a small zit on the side of my cheek. I simply enjoyed experimenting with light and color, seeing what new edits I could create.
This one form of artistry slowly began to grow into an addiction. I became increasingly picky about my photos. I wouldn't upload a picture that I really liked if it didn't match my color scheme, and I started layering multiple editing apps to meticulously alter every single photo, artificially matching it to coordinate perfectly with my desired aesthetic.
The obsessiveness really started to overtake when my social media presence began to interfere with my real-world actions. If I went anywhere that I found to be picturesque, I NEEDED to take as many pictures as possible until I got a shot that might acceptable to put on my Instagram. I started to care less about the memories that were actually being made and more about the memories that would match my theme.
This obsession over perfection began to grow into a virus against my self-esteem. Like many people, I started comparing my Instagram with others. I'd become far too invested in other people's lives and would use the accounts that I idolized as a template for what should be on my own. I gave up my creative freedom and became a slave to what I believed was most socially desired, posting out of a need to validate myself through the virtual likes of others. Looking back now this mentality is sickening.
My account didn't even have that many followers. The accounts that I was striving to emulate all had well over 100,000 followers each. I had less than a thousand. It's funny because even at my most obsessive, I didn't care that much about the number of followers I had, rather I wanted the few that I had to find my account immaculate.
When I finally deactivated it, I was overwhelmed by a sense of relief. I realized that my account and other people's accounts didn't matter in the slightest. What mattered was the power I was giving them to control my life. They no longer had that control.
It's been about a month now since I deactivated my Instagram. I know at some point I'll have to bring it back for my career, but I'll be able to do so with a sense of clarity through the awareness I now have over it.
I personally believe that growing up with the rapid advances of technology and the increasing presence of social media has taken a psychological toll on my generation as a whole. A lot of my friends have deactivated or even fully deleted all their social media account because of struggles similar to mine. I don't think social media itself is a bad thing, but I don't think we as humans have yet to figure out the balance between using it as a tool instead of being entirely consumed by it. As I said, this is my personal experience, and I'm sure there are those who have found the key to this, but as a whole, it's good to take a step back and reflect on the overall effects of social media- for the better or the worst.
