How Instagram made me Hate and Love myself
This is a story of you and me and many people like us.
I still remember the first time I made an account on Instagram. I was 15 years old, pretty young and at that time this app had a storm of hype in and around my friend’s circle. Call it peer pressure or excitement I too gave it a shot. Little did I know then that this app solely would have a huge impact on my life.
I still remember the first time I made an account on Instagram. I was 15 years old, pretty young and at that time this app had a storm of hype in and around my friend’s circle. Call it peer pressure or excitement I too gave it a shot. Little did I know then that this app solely would have a huge impact on my life.
The first thing I did was follow a bunch of celebrities and influencers that I knew of and then followed all my friends. I kid you not this app took me by amazement. I started spending from few minutes to long hours on this app. Pictures after pictures and account after account, I kept browsing for hours.
I loved gazing all the Instagram models with their perfect body, pretty face, aesthetic clothes and extravagant lifestyle. Subconsciously I started wanting to be like them, dress up like them, have hour-glass shaped bodies like them and most importantly have an amazing and blissful life like them. Well real life isn’t that perfect, is it?
But who would have told this to my teenage self back then?
The next thing I know I started copying them. I applied makeup the way they did, I altered my old clothes to make them look like their clothes, and I clicked pictures the way they did. However, it would always end up disappointing me as I looked nowhere like them. I still posted the pics that I felt were good and I loved the bunch of comments, appreciation and the number of followers that came by.
Pretty soon this became a huge part of life. The likes, the comments, the hours spent on clicking one picture, the hours spent on comparing myself with those “perfect’’ people on the internet. The effort I started putting in to try thousands of various diets suggested by them and mostly ended up starving myself.
I started hating myself eventually and I didn’t even realise. I would stand in front of the mirror and scrutinize myself and pick out my flaws. I would tell myself how ugly my body is. I had one mental breakdown once every three days realizing how unpleasant I looked. It was an ordeal where I felt the ugliest and most unwanted. I also felt I had the worst life with no cool friends, no crazy vacations, and no beautiful, big houses. It started affecting my mental health a lot and I started losing my confidence and my self-esteem.
But one fine day I came across a girl’s account who was different. She did not have a perfect body and yet she flaunted it beautifully. She did not have an extravagant lifestyle and yet had a good amount of followers and admirers. She took me by surprise when I saw her posting her ‘’imperfect’’ pictures with stretch marks visible, hair uncombed, belly protruded out and yet one thing constant in all her pictures was her smile.
A confident, pleasant smile.
I immediately followed her cause I fell in love with the immense confidence she was flaunting her ‘imperfections’ with. I stalked her and came to know she was a writer and she specifically wrote and talked about women, feminism and unrealistic beauty standards.
After following her for a week I came across this post of her’s about how most of the “influencers” that we see on Instagram are merely sharing their curated life on the internet. They have flaws too, they go through their lowest too but they never share that other side of the coin on the internet. This was the first time when somebody educated my teenage self about the fact that what we see on the internet is not always true, that EVERYONE has their ups and low and that nobody is perfect. People just don’t share that side on their accounts.
So I unfollowed a lot of people who made me feel insecure and bad about myself and followed more people who shared messages of self-confidence and self-love and who did not promote only unrealistic beauty and lifestyle standards.
I feel this was one of the biggest steps that I took in my journey of loving myself. And I know this isn’t just MY STORY. This is a story of you and me and many people like us. Most of us has been through this phase and some of us are still struggling to get out of it.
It is not easy to accept and love ourselves just the way we are amidst this internet where people are trolled and bullied for not fitting into the conventional beauty standards set by society. It’s a difficult journey and it takes time, but it is an imperative journey to take because if YOU and I won’t change so won’t the society.
