The past month has been a train wreck for me. I've been coping and working with myself to move past the stress. However, I can never seem to get better.
Last weekend, I spent time with my best friend-- whom I hadn't seen in quite sometime. We talked, laughed, and it made me feel much better afterwards. Yesterday, I decided that maybe there was something I hadn't noticed that was setting me back from my true contentment. I look back to times when I was truly content and I always notice something that pops out at me-- I was never on my phone.
I started using social media in my 8th grade year. I followed the bandwagon around me because I felt left out. At first, I used Instagram just to communicate with my friends and to post funny pictures. The longer I had social media, the more I was sucked into it. Whenever a new update would come out I would be ecstatic for all of the new features. I would be on social media a majority of my day. Instagram led to Facebook, to keep in contact with my family, which led to Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr, Discord and Twitter. All of these platforms kept me on my phone. Whenever I would wake up I would check my phone. Whenever I saw a notification on one of the many social platforms, I would click on it before a message or phone call from my family. I had a social media addiction. Yes, I was not as addicted as others but there was still the fact that when I was with people who I hadn't been with in a long time, that I had missed, I would still just go on Instagram's explore page and watch slime videos and look at memes. The "I use social media to talk to people" was no longer valid. People have other forms of communication, and though some can only use their social platforms to communicate, it was not that way for me or the people I would talk to.
So, I made an impulse decision. I asked the people who I didn't have the numbers of for their numbers and I deleted social media. I've only had it deleted for a short amount of time, not even 24 hours, but I am still opening up my phone to click on where I had memorized that my social media apps were, and I click something that wasn't what I wanted to.
Lack of social media has so far been a hard habit to break, but a necessary one.
Being on social media as often as I was had made me forget the things I missed and isolated me from the outside world.
There are many things that I missed that I only missed because I let social media take a hold on me. Social media can be an amazing thing for communication and knowing what’s happening in places far from you, but you lose the acknowledgement and understanding of the world around you.
It's not Sunday, but who says self care has to be on only one day?