When I came back from my semester of studying abroad, I was met with the disdain of many of my friends over the fact that I barely posted anything on social media while I was there. They seemed almost outraged that I could spend six months living in Paris and only posted one or two photos on Instagram—to them, it almost seemed like a waste of a semester. How could I have lived in such a beautiful city and not plastered my social media profiles with pictures?
More recently, when I returned from a trip to India, I was talking to a friend who was shocked to learn that I had been traveling around the country for almost three weeks and never posted anything. “I had no idea you were even there!”, she kept saying, which made me realize that, in her eyes, I basically never was there. Not only did it seem like a pointless trip without a good social media post, but my lack of posting was like a lack of proof that it even happened.
For a long time, I saw social media as a way of presenting the best version of myself. Through pictures, videos and daily updates I felt like I could create the exact image of who I wanted to be and convey that to everyone I knew: someone popular, artistic, exciting, who has tons of friends and is always having fun. The nature of social media often makes it difficult to distinguish this kind of image from who someone truly is. According to the Instagram profiles I follow, it seems as though everyone I know is constantly on vacation, at a party and looking their best.
What started out as a desire to present a better version of myself through social media became an obsession with curating my reputation. As soon as I came to college, I began incessantly looking for exciting things to post to remind everyone I knew that I was having an amazing time at school. When I met someone new, it was an opportunity to show my followers how many friends I was making. Doing something fun was a chance to remind everyone that I was living an exciting life. Posting began to feel like an obligation that took over all my thoughts—if I wasn’t snapchatting, was I even having fun?
Eventually, something made me stop sharing on social media. As my freshman year of college went on, and as I felt more secure in my college experience, I no longer felt the need to constantly convince others that my entire life was perfect and amazing.
While I still spend a lot of my time scrolling through different social media and keeping up with what my friends and family are doing, I now use the platforms for amusement rather than to make myself feel better. I no longer need to convince myself I’m having a great time by posting about it, instead creating my own memories and not feeling the anxiety of sharing them with others. Today, I can finally watch a concert without feeling the need to film every second, I can go on vacation without stressing about getting the perfect photo to post. It wasn’t until I put my phone down that I started to really look at everything I was so desperately trying to capture.
