Don’t get me wrong, I am all about taking nice pictures and seeing what’s going on in my friend’s lives, but I do believe we can easily give social media too much power to make or break our feelings of self-worth. My personal experience with this was during my last week of Christmas break when I decided to get rid of Instagram and Snapchat for 21 days.
My first semester of college dragged me into a lot of unhealthy comparisons, therefore Snapchat and Instagram stories became my worst enemy. I was obsessed with them. Anytime I was alone and not doing something fun, I would weigh myself down by looking at what everyone else around me was doing and it made me feel as if my life was never enough.
College campuses can become such tight-knit communities, especially if you’re at a small Christian university like me. It is easy to feel uninvited and overlooked in these kinds of places. When I took all of that noise out of my life, it opened a door for me to focus on myself, my family and my life. I came back on campus not having "FOMO" from seeing what everyone else around me was doing and I was not getting upset when I saw my friends hanging out without me.
For once in my life, I didn’t care about what everyone else was doing. This brought much-needed stillness in my life. Don’t get this confused with loneliness. Stillness is something I believe we all need in our lives from time to time. It’s when we can actually embrace being alone and use it to our advantage.
There’s a quote I read once that said: “God’s voice requires stillness of the soul.” Social media is loud. If you let too much of it in, it can overpower all of your alone time. It can make you feel unwanted and not enough. God wants to speak to you who you really are and welcomes you to his table. If you have been closing your Instagram or Snapchat apps feeling discouraged, I want to invite you to take some time off from other people's lives and focus on your own.
Whether that means deleting the app for a few days or just shutting it down for a night. I guarantee there will be a shift in your attitude and confidence. You will be more productive and motivated to get things done when you cut the procrastination tactic of scrolling through your feed out of your life for a minute.
As children of God, we are called to be in the world but not of the world. Living in our world it is easy and completely okay to have social media and keep other updated on your life and you can make all of that an enjoyable experience! Being of the world is when we let these profiles and feeds become our lives. When I was off social media, it brought conversations with friends that I would have never been able to have.
People would ask me why I decided to get off for awhile, and it encouraged them to do the same. Our job is to be a change to the world around us and little moments like that is what God may be calling you to right now. If you resonate with all of this, go for it! There's no better time than right now to let God do something new in your life. Everything in life is a balance, don’t let comparison get the best of you this year!
