Before we start, I want to let y’all know in no way am I trying to tell you how to use your social media or dictate what is useful and what isn’t when it comes to it. I am writing this to show you how powerful social media is in terms of defining one’s self-worth or image when it’s used in its easily superficial ways versus how it can actually do more good than harm.
I first started using Instagram when I was in middle school and was late to the game already. When I finally created an account and followed “friends” from school (who were not really my friends but haters), I already was super aware of the amount of likes they had versus the amount I had. Likes became a marker of what was cool and what wasn’t for a lot of people and if something didn’t get as many likes as we initially hoped, we would delete the post altogether. That, to me, was (and is) the scariest thing about social media. We pride ourselves on being “authentic” and “real” but then delete things that we liked because of numbers. Thankfully, tearing that thinking apart and actually wanting a feed that was as me as I could get on social media helped me stop paying as much attention to the numbers. Another problem with paying attention to the numbers, apart from self-image issues, we are allowing Instagram to be a place full of trends and people who aren’t real. Editing our pictures to look like someone we admire (who isn’t ourselves) is giving a lot of power to these apps and the standards of beauty in our society, don’t you think?
I used to follow a lot of people who I thought were beautiful, and I loved watching how they lived. But the problem is the beauty and lives of these people were never going to be achievable to me. Apart from the fact I was never going to be white and have their hair or body, I allowed people I don’t even know have the power of making me feel less than and subsequently not beautiful. Now I know for most models and celebrities, that isn’t their intent, it’s just something that comes with their jobs. We see them in magazines and on TV so much that our standards of beauty are dictated by the few features we regularly see.
With all this being said, I ended up taking a break from social media for a couple of months once I got into high school, and when I returned, I unfollowed every account that made me feel like I wasn’t beautiful too. I know that sounds extreme, but at the time, doing that and then following influencers who looked like me, or shared commonalities helped me actually enjoy social media for what it is: apps that are supposed to bring people from everywhere and anywhere together. I have since gone back and followed accounts of models, but I needed to reteach and relearn what beauty really meant to me first. Getting caught up in the glam and money can really blind you from what is really important, like how to improve ourselves from the inside, and then sharing our light and positivity with everyone out and around us. Following accounts that feed the parts of myself apart from makeup and fashion actually helped me build my confidence back up. Accounts about how you can improve physically (fitness, yoga, etc.), mentally (authors, poets, etc.), spiritually (following people of different faiths that actually talk about faith) have helped me appreciate all the things I have got going on. At the same time, they welcomed even more makeup and fashion into my life.
Don’t let Instagram or Twitter or any app let you believe that filtered and retouched photos are the reality. They are cool and maybe inspiring to look at, but remind yourself, you’re real, and you’re actually here, so whose opinion apart from your own matters?