This past weekend, Instagram — admittedly, never the best use of my time — was an even more unhealthy place to be, as the social media platform was almost exclusively a highlight reel of happy couples celebrating Valentine’s Day. With every scroll I was inundated with photos of loved-up couples, with love letters penned in the captions and heart-eye emojis littering the comments. While I don’t begrudge people their right to post messages flaunting their love — I can admit full well that if I was in a relationship, I likely would’ve done the same — that doesn’t mean it was necessarily enjoyable or particularly healthy for me to see. With each scroll came the reminder of everything I didn’t have.
This was true also when Kendall Jenner posted a few photos of her flawless lingerie photoshoot for Kim Kardashian’s clothing line Skims. Jenner looked incredible, and while I’m fully aware that lighting and angles exist and that she was perfectly dolled up and by no means looks like that all of the time, it still wasn’t the greatest thing to open up Instagram and see. Knowing full well that her post was promoting an unrealistic body standard, I still compared myself to her, much like I compared my own life with the lives of the happy couples posting Instagram story after Instagram story about their relationships.
The turning point came when I noticed that once I closed out of Instagram this weekend, I felt significantly worse than I had earlier that day. Before I’d opened the app and was immediately confronted with everything I seemed to be missing, comparing my life and body to others’ hadn’t occurred to me. It got me thinking: What would happen if I didn’t open the app at all? Better yet, what if I deleted it entirely?
I realized eventually that having had Instagram for years, I have friends from elementary, middle and high school for which Instagram is our main point of contact. I didn’t want to quit the app and thereby lose my way of staying in touch with them, so I did the next best thing: I shrunk down my followers and following count. I stopped following Kendall Jenner and almost every other celebrity, and I unfollowed and removed many of the Valentine’s couples who were practically strangers to me.
Though it’s only been a few days, Instagram already is a much less toxic place for me. My homepage is now almost entirely friends and family, so I’m genuinely excited to scroll through and see what they’ve been up to. Having eliminated all the random people following me, I now feel free to post whatever I want on my page and on my Instagram story. I’m not sure if this is the endgame solution — maybe I will eventually bite the bullet and delete Instagram entirely — but as of right now, I feel free.