As I’ve gotten older, social media has become something that anchors my social life. We consistently use apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter to communicate with those around us. Still, above that, something is going on with these social media apps that seem obvious, but is often ignored. Personally, I use Instagram constantly. When I stopped to think about how I really approach Instagram, I concluded that I use it as a way to create myself. But this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Anyone who uses Instagram gets to choose what photos are posted, how they’re edited, and what moments of your life you want people to see. But, it’s not real, it feels like a regular performance. Something is addicting about being able to make this idea of the coolest person you can be something public and almost tangible. But, I only choose to post from the days when I look the best or when I have lighting that makes me glow, or posting artistic photos from the small artsy moments that I experience in my day to day life. Creating these moments of perfection, which are hard to hold onto, something permanent that I can go back and look at whenever I want, is empowering. Perhaps I can change or hide who I really am, what I really look like in natural lighting without makeup and a killer outfit.
Why do I feel this need to continually present these fleeting moments of perfection to feel confident about myself? Why is my go-to confidence booster a scroll through my Instagram account? When I open Instagram, I am bombarded with posts catching those fleeting moments of perfection, much like my own, creating a facade of what the experience of day to day life really is. I personally feel as if there is so much pressure to take the definition of “living” and to turn it into something impossible, setting expectations of constant visible perfection and excitement. This builds up a lot of pressure, because living this way is simply hard! And when feeling that it’s necessary to create these moments on Instagram, I find myself losing touch with appreciation for the beauty found in the ordinary.
I am going to challenge you to join me in taking a step away from my screen and my fabricated life and learning to love what is always with me, my body that is beautiful because it’s not perfect and not always ready to be seen. Allow yourself this week to reflect on how something such as social media, specifically Instagram, has such a significant influence on how you see the world, and how that isn’t always a healthy view. When approaching social media, society shouldn’t use it as a way to fabricate an impossible perfection. We should be using social media to share our true selves, the ones that we have and that we are learning to love. Hopefully, at some point, this will change, and opening Instagram will make us feel gratified about the reality we are in rather than packing on pressure to live a glamorous life full of travels and perfectly photoshopped pictures of ourselves, the self that does not genuinely exist. But until that time, all that we can do is embrace our bodies and our reality as it is, right now, in its natural day to day form.