On my my journey to social media cleansing, I thought I would share with you all why I decided to do this, and why it has been so refreshing!
Do you ever have those days where you find yourself scrolling through social media until your phone actually gets hot? I swear, Facebook and Instagram are never ending wormholes. You start on your friend’s post, where you liked her shirt, then you click the link to the store page for that shirt. Then suddenly you end up on a page dedicated to the preservation of the polar ice caps. I kid you not, this is how it happens lol!
The Moment I Knew…
“Temporarily closed for spiritual maintenance”, that was my last post to social media that I made just about 6 weeks ago. I remember that day, I was going through a lot emotionally. My job as a preschool teacher isn’t always play dough and read aloud’s. There are things in my life that I have been working at for quite some time that just haven’t panned out and honestly, my heart, mind and soul were on their last bar of battery. We all have those days where we feel burnt out and ready to cry at the drop of a dime, right?
As I sat on my couch scrolling through Instagram, I began thinking…what the heck am I doing? Why am I scrolling through this random person’s feed when I could be devoting this time doing actual things that I love and that are food to my soul? Things like reading, painting (I love paint by numbers!), baking, spending time talking to my husband and I mean really talking.
How it all began for me…
I remember when the whole craze of social media first began. I was in high school and I had to make a fake Facebook account by using a friends college email since I didn’t have one. Do you guys remember when you needed a college email to have a Facebook account?! The world of social media has come so far since then. We had Myspace, twitter and relatively recently, Instagram.
My first instagram post, I remember feeling like it was so weird to take a picture of something and then share with my followers. Why would they care that I was at Costco, that I was eating a croissant or that I was on the subway…why?! (ok, I get it, my life maybe wasn’t that interesting lol) Shoot to today and people are using these platforms as a sole source of income. People are using these apps to stay in touch with family, to keep updated on celebrity gossip, and even to network for a job (LinkedIn).
The truth about social media…
What we need to remember is what we are seeing on these pages is the best version of someone. We don’t often see the days when someone is sick, when their hair comes out horrible, or when they are just having a horrible day. Who wants to post that anyway?! It can be absolutely exhausting trying to “keep up” with the lives of those who present themselves to you online. I want to state loud and clear that it is 100% ok to put down your phone and stop looking at your screen viewing everyone else’s life and to start living your own. In a world driven by likes, comments, and oversharing, when is enough, enough? What happened to the mystery in someone’s life, the feeling of “hey, I haven’t heard from this person in a while, let me give them a ring or shoot them a text”?
If you too are reading this and feeling like you can relate, then do yourself a favor and take a break. Delete your apps for a little while, pick up a new hobby, spend more time making truly meaningful human connections. Unplug your mind body and soul from being tied down to the robbery of time, and the robbery of genuine living. Give your mind, body and soul a cleanse for a little while, I promise, you won’t regret it!
[For the sake of being fully transparent, I still have Youtube. Also in an effort to be completely transparent, I have been obsessed with Angry Birds 2, Words with Friends 2, and the Calm app, all new apps that I have downloaded when I replaced my other apps 😊]
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