Having a Leo sun, I love attention. I love talking about myself, receiving compliments, and I especially love when other people love me. However, I have started to realize that the validation I seek from others hurts me more than it lifts me up. In the peak of my Snapchat addiction, I would plot and plan for the best time to post a picture of myself to get the biggest reaction, and the most compliments. At the time, I thought nothing was wrong with this and indulged frequently in the attention it got me. I was too focused on the instant gratification I got with every so and so is typing…notification I got and not on how I felt hours later, when no one was interacting with me anymore. In those moments, I was left with an emptiness I needed to fill, and became reliant on that validation to feel whole again.
I always felt that I was able to be above that kind of social media reliance. Aside from the initial novelty of a new account, I never posted very much to any of my accounts and never felt the addiction that seemed to seize my peers. I foolishly thought I was above it all, not realizing the harmful patterns I had in my own life. It started innocently enough; for the first time, I had become genuinely confident and secure with myself. I had (mostly) shed my introverted shell and found myself getting attention I had never been used to, especially from men.
They were responding to me in a way I had never experienced in high school, and felt like I was finally being recognized as the beautiful young woman I was. It felt like harmless fun to post a picture and see how many messages I could get afterwards. But harmless it was not. Relying on that validation they gave me to feel good about myself resulted in me feeling not good enough, isolated, and alone when I wasn’t receiving any, which began to take its toll on my mental health.
The breaking point happened for me last summer, after a fall-out with a very close friend and the loss of my job. I realized how alone I felt and my first solution was to post something for a random boy to see. Before I hit send though, I sat there and thought about the consequences of my actions. What was the point of posting something for one person to see, when I could just send it directly to them? Was I posting it just to get their attention, or did I want everyone to see it? What message was this sending? I had no good answers to those questions, and that is when I realized the situation I put myself in.
It has been a long (and sometimes difficult) journey of learning how to go on without seeking validation, but I am finally happy with where I am. I am confident with myself and who I am without needing others to notice and comment on how I look or what I’m doing. This doesn’t mean that I still don’t post anything, because I do. I just learned to limit what and where I post. I share what I feel is appropriate with my followers, and have set boundaries for myself (like not adding people to my private story just because the selfie I’m posting looks especially good). This is the healthy balance for me, and I applaud those who can post more without becoming too obsessed with the numbers. Maybe someday I’ll get there, but I need to always make sure that my #1 focus is myself and how I’m feeling. No more posting for others, but for myself.
Written by Anna Dunigan |@itsmetaphysical