Earlybird, Rise, Inkwell and (the dreaded) Kelvin are just a few of the filters Instagram offers to its users. Some people like to get a little more serious with their filter game and download multiple photo editing apps just to achieve the perfect selfie.
Instagram is hot right now and everyone is looking to find the best Instagram theme. Let’s be honest, if your Instagram isn’t lit, then you need to reevaluate some things in your life. (That sentence was a lie. I’m going to tell you why.)
Our lives are not our Instagrams. We are so much more than a bunch of photos of ourselves, our friends and our food. You are so much more than that. I want to know more about you as a person. I honestly couldn’t care less if you “had the best cheesecake of your life” on Tuesday. I don’t care if you can take a cool picture at the beach and caption it with a sad quote directed at your ex-boyfriend. Tell me about where you want to be in ten years. Tell me about why you prefer cats over dogs. I want to know you for who you are, which is not what the random girl in Nebraska who follows you knows as you.
You are more than your likes. So much more. I too, like many, fall in to the system of the likes where you do everything you can to get likes, to be relevant.. but for what? Why do I care so much if a picture of my roommate and I receives over 50 likes? I know that I had fun taking the picture but I also just enjoy spending time with her, and that's enough. I don’t need other people to validate my emotions, and neither do you. We post our favorite moments on Instagram, so why do we need other people to think of them as that amazing, too?
I’m going to let you in on a little secret… there might be a perfect Instagram post, but there is no perfect life that it can truly reflect. Everyone may look like their life is put together when they post a picture of their report card of straight A’s, but they don’t post a selfie of themselves crying two weeks before finals because they were too stressed out to even sleep. Instagram is used to make our lives look fabulous. So if you see someone on the app and think “it must be great to be them," think again. Someone else's beauty is not the absence of your own. Life is too short to scroll though someone’s highlight reel while wishing to be them. Instead of wishing to have an Instagram like theirs, go out and be proactive. Visit new places, try new food, meet new people.. just do anything to make memories.
Make memories that you can’t capture in a photo, because those are the ones that are going to last you so much longer than one from 47 weeks ago with 82 likes.
