I appear to be your regular, everyday college student, but one thing separates me from the majority of my peers. I do not have a Snapchat, Twitter, or Instagram. I have a Facebook, but I very rarely post, nor do I check it every day. I have a VSCO account, but that is all that I regularly use. For the most part, I am social-media free.

For a while, I was busy cutting down my following and friends on all of my accounts. I was tired of scrolling through feeds of posts that I truly did not care about, or that made me respond negatively in any way. I made first made the decision to start fading away from social media completely about 4 months ago, in March. I started by just removing the apps from my phone. This was a lot easier than I thought it would be, and a sigh of relief. I felt free from drama and negativity that I would see online. After a talk with my boyfriend, I had his full support, so we started the social-media free journey together. I wasn't using the apps, so why not remove myself completely? Within the next few weeks my boyfriend and I both had completely deactivated our Snapchat and Instagram accounts. Shortly thereafter, I deleted my Twitter, which he kindly declined not to do, for news and sports purposes.

I was scared that I would be tempted to reactivate my accounts before they were terminated for good. But I did not waver. I was scared that I would be transported back to the stone age with no connections to the world around me, but that is not true. Instead, I found that the people that I regularly talked to on social media, I would still talk to without it. In some ways, this made our relationships stronger than ever. Removing myself from social media weeded out all of the people who were more of acquaintances than friends.

Sometimes I do miss the quick update that you would get from a Snap, much less formal than a real conversation, but then I think how much more important real communication is. Seeing people that I haven't talked to in a while is still a nice surprise, and it is very nice to talk and catch up.

I do not regret my decision to remove myself from most social media. It has made me realize who still cares about me and will make an effort to be a part of my life. I highly reccomend going social media free for a while. All in all, I am thankful for freeing up all the time I spent on social media, so now I have more time to watch Netflix!