Social media is bad for your mental health, but that doesn't change the massive influence it has and will continue to have on millions of users' lives. Although social media usage has proven destructive to a healthy mindset, millions of users persist to celebrate and overuse what has become an addiction.

Social media began as a place for people to communicate their story, adventures, and personal profiles with the people they chose and has become a competitive platform that has twisted beauty standards into a singular mold while being an industry that individually targets users' feeds with advertisements.

Social media users in 2018 spent an average of two hours on media platforms a day. Last summer, I found that I was being consumed by my social media, depriving me of myself and the people around me, so I deleted my social media applications until I started college. This sudden detoxification of all social media was strange at first, but liberating after a week when I realized how much happier and mindful I was about life. I began to love my body, face, and fashion so much more than before because I wasn't constantly comparing myself to the photoshopped and perfected models that were constantly appearing on my feed. This realization could not have occurred so quickly if not for my sudden deletion of all social media, and after a couple of months of building a healthy state of mind, I was ready to dip my foot into online media again.

When I re-downloaded my social media applications, I didn't have the need to go on them at all, which gave me more time to be in the moment with the people I cared about. Everyone on my timeline seemed to get less important, which allowed me to focus on my own image without the perfecting pressures that most people were conforming to.

The major decrease in obsessing over everyone else on my timeline influenced me to rebuild my profiles the way I wanted to. I found myself posting pictures I genuinely liked instead of heavily editing a perfect photograph, hoping for a lot of likes. My profiles felt like my own now, I don't spend hours scrolling through other peoples airbrushed lives and I have found a sense of self-love and care that I never had before. I have social media, I post regularly, and I am not consumed or influenced by its deception; this healthy balance took time and effort but paid off in terms of my mental wellbeing.