Free

A few weeks ago my interest in social media had slowly faded away. Everything felt repetitive, superficial, and irrelevant. Not long after that, I turned off the notifications from the apps, not including Snapchat because I had to continue my streaks.

Honestly, it's great. You don't feel the nagging tug to check your feed, and if you are honest with it, you lose that feeling of being left out or uninformed about what other people are doing with their lives. You realize that there are other things to do and your own life to worry about. You stop comparing yourself to other people and their seemingly perfect lives and perfect complexion because you realize that we are all equal but unique in our own ways, and that everyone only shows their best selves out there on social media. You stop feeling the anxiety of wanting to post the perfect picture that fits the theme of your feed, and finding the perfect filter and caption. You realize that you don't really need any of that at all.

And that can tie into witnessing all the trolling and cyberbullying. Once you've cleansed yourself from social media, other extraneous things get easier to let go of. Out of sight, out of mind. Seeing how bad people can be online had made me grow a displeasure for people in general. It made me see society as horrible and sad, walking around at school and seeing loud or obnoxious groups of people had made it worse. But spending time outside of the digital world had cleared my mind up more, and reading has helped. I had forgotten for a while about all the evils of the internet because I hadn't accessed it or had cared to, and while this can be hard to do, it's completely do-able. Hear it from me, or anyone else, who has spent hours on end refreshing their feed, with nothing new or important learned but still yearning to see something new. Or binge-watching youtube videos and watching everyone's snapchat story. That thankfully got old really fast. And I wish I hadn't wasted all my time on that. They won't really matter. It was all just an outlet for my boredom and a place to waste my time and help me forget about the real responsibilities I was trying to avoid. It made me see people in a negative and discouraging light. It made me insecure. Thankfully I was able to get away from it all. And anyone is capable of doing this if they really wanted to.