*Trigger Warning- This post may be triggering for anyone who is recovering, just a heads up*
Social Media has it’s advantages. As a blogger, it is the main way I attract my followers and how I keep people interested. It is how I communicate with people and it is how I have made new friends. However, it’s not always a good thing…
Today, I’m taking a topic I have always wanted to discuss but I’ve never known how to word it. Social media is something I have always found useful, even more now due to my blogging and sharing my life with the people who I can no longer be near. I use it as a way to share things I’m proud of, support my friends, and just interact with my followers all over the world.
However, social media certainly has a dark side that no one will ever discuss. Many times, one post on social media has taken me back many weeks. My recovery process has gone backwards, and sometimes, I’ve even started from scratch because of something I’ve seen.
Now, maybe you think this post will be complaining about the girls who I see on Instagram, because I’m just another person jealous of them, and what they have. However, I’m just going to say that I don’t feel the need to bring others down on my blog, or slate others to make myself feel better. So, if you’re looking for a good old bitch post, this one isn’t for you.
Social media really had an impact on me when I was possibly 13/14. I used it a lot, I try to use it far less now, or stick to things that I know will be ‘good’ for me. There are a lot of things on social media that sometimes can’t be avoided. And, sometimes, people are trying to spread their toxicity around the internet. In the form of trolling, Tumblr blogs dedicated to dark things and mental illness, and catfishing. ALL of that, is the terrible side of social that no one will ever bloody discuss.
As an impressionable young girl, those sites just increased how lonely I felt. How sad I was, how much I hated myself, how much I hated everyone around me. I thought that nothing good existed in the world, the only way to deal with it was to shut myself off and punish myself because I didn’t think I was even enough for what the world seemed to be. Social media really was an absolute bitch slap in the face every single day. Every day, I was reminded of how little I was to the world, of how much I didn’t matter.
Everyone else on social media was having a great time, why wasn’t I? Why wasn’t I that pretty? Or that thin? No one was interested in me because no one liked my things; in my eyes, no one bloody cared about me. Social media really did play a part in my downfall, but now, I guess, I’ve turned that around by using my social media as good outlet. I can meet likeminded people, who all motivate each other and support each other.
There were websites that told you how to self harm, places that told you that you were worthless. My Tumblr was constantly crawling in gifs that were sad, lonely, about things that were so negative it took me to a dark place. Now, I avoid those kind of things. I fill my Pinterest with positive images, I post motivation all over my social media, because I know that’s what I want to see… and hopefully that others want to see, also.
No one discusses that social media has a twisted dark side, and that it becomes too much, sometimes. We are encouraged to lose weight, through bad techniques, told what to eat, called names if we don’t agree with something that someone has said. We are catfished, we are tricked into believing things that aren’t real- cue Photoshop and all the little apps used to edit how we look (I use we, but I am disclaiming that I have NEVER used a body edit app, all I do is edit the brightness and the colours). We are told things that clearly aren’t true. There is a generation of young people growing up in the social media age, and, sometimes, they may not see the bigger picture around what is posted. Social media is what they sleep, breathe and eat. They are constantly watched in their life.
Social media is, still, something that I battle with. I have to remind myself that I can shut it all off with the press of one button. I can walk away from it all if I want to. I can just say no to posting myself on the internet. I can stop blogging, I can leave it all behind. However, 14 year old me didn’t know that, and I’m fairly certain there are lots of young people out there who feel the same. Social media is like a dice; most of the time you roll it and you win, but sometimes you lose, and that is something people don’t understand.
If anything mentioned in this blog post has impacted you, then please seek help or guidance.
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Love,
LegallyFierceFeminist 