Why I Stopped Using Social Media As A Woman In Her Early 20s

And How it has Changed my Life for the Better

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How the Poison was Administered

The year is 2015. Snapchat had been getting popular around this time amongst young teens like myself. I was just about to start high school, and when I say high school, I mean starting another 4 years of learning online through homeschooling. My parents had recently gotten me the iPhone 5c. The salmon pink one to be exact. Once I started high school, my parents thought I was responsible enough to have Snapchat. I was super excited! Since I was playing sports at the local high school as well, and the whole team was on social media, I didn’t have to feel left out.

I still remember my first selfie. If any of y’all remember the old Snapchat, they had the dog face filter, the flower crown filter we all loved, and so many other silly filters. I used the flower crown filter and snapped the picture. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, I look so much prettier with this filter on”. That’s when the poison was first administered.

The Vain Cyber World

Some years go by, and I now have Instagram. After years of developing insecurities through Snapchat, I was now taking those insecurities to the field of an even worse app. Instagram is brilliant in the worst way possible. You scroll for hours, viewing posts of celebrities with the perfect face, body, and life, and then Instagram allows you to make posts that come across in the same way (with the help of filters and camera tricks of course). Eventually, you’re trapped in this loop of feeling like sh*t about yourself because you don’t feel good looking enough, so you take more and more pictures to try to look good for your audience. Once you finally think you look good, you get fewer likes than you hoped for, making you think it’s because you aren’t pretty enough. It’s sick man.

Hours Wasted

So now I download TikTok a bit later. Who thought this would be a good idea for this now insecure girl? I guess I did. Now this may be the nicest thing I’ve said about social media, but TikTok seemed like the lesser of the many evils. It didn’t thrive on vanity as much as Instagram did. Don’t get me…