picture via pinterest
Okay, so this may be getting annoying and completely overplayed, but I am absolutely loving the blatant honesty going around about social media. Australian blogger, Essena O'Neill, recently quit social media and started a campaign called "Social Media is Not Real Life". She had over half a million Instagram followers, 200K YouTube followers, 60K Snapchat followers; you get the picture. Her issue was that social media puts too much pressure on people to be perfect and ultimately hurts self esteem and I think she's on to something. Now, quitting all social media may be a bit extreme, but I think she was trying to prove a point. Molly from a Piece of Toast posted about it just last week and Emily from Cupcakes and Cashmere also touched on the subject with a "Social Media vs. Real Life" post. It's very refreshing hearing these girl's take on the matter and just knowing we're all in the same boat helps; whether you have 100K followers or 1K, it can affect you.
Real talk: when I first started my blog I was overwhelmed with the encouragement and compliments I would receive. I was so flattered by it all. Well, eventually all of that started to wear off. With anything new, it loses it's appeal after some time. I totally understand that, but I kept blogging (and keep planning to) because it's a love of mine and the external praises weren't the reason I started. Anywho, after moving to DC and getting to know the blogging scene, I began to realize how many events, dinners, etc. went on and how I was only being invited to small handful of them. I also started noticing other blogger's stats growing while mine were stagnant. Both things were killing my vibe. I mean, who the eff cares, right? But for some reason it was affecting me. After listening to Essena's video (honestly, not the whole thing..it's 17 minutes long and who has time for that?), I became much more aware of how a lot of my confidence and esteem was coming from numbers, collabs, invites and the like. That isn't okay. I think it's important to remember that social media, as important as it can be, should not determine your worth. A person's worth should be determined by a number of factors, but the number of "likes" on a photo shouldn't be one of them. Have any of y'all seen the video? Thoughts?
You can watch the video here:
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