you win every comparison you don't subject yourself to

on getting out of the social media rat race

The best decision I’ve made so far this year has been deleting Instagram. It’s been a month and a half now, and my mind has been more at peace, I’ve been feeling more comfortable in my skin, and just general day-to-day existence somehow feels lighter.

Scrolling through social media is being constantly brought face-to-face with all the different, amazing things people are doing with their lives; always presented in their most glittering and glamorous light, without ever giving you a window into the inner workings of it.

For someone like me, who wants to do everything there is to do and wants to be good at all of it, social media wasn’t the best way to spend time before bed every night.

Within that 30-minute window, I would look at fitness influencers and wish I could lift like they do, then look at book influencers and wish I had the time to read as much as they do, and then look at travel influencers and wish I could make travel a bigger part of my life, like they have. Trying to understand which of them I was actually drawn to was like my version of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree. I never could figure out whether I really wanted to do any of those things or if they just looked on camera in that moment.

I thought I was taking inspiration, but all I was doing was being consumed by the noise of what everyone else was doing, at all times, and feeling like I needed to do it too - even when it barely fit into my life and what I wanted to do with it.

I’ve fallen into the trap of “xyz’s life is so perfect” enough times, and my bubble has been broken every single time I’ve learned more about them from a closer source or been around them in an offline setting. The only time I’ve seen perfection is when I’ve seen it from far enough.

Not knowing what everyone else is doing, on the other hand, has helped make space to create the life I’d actually want when no one’s watching. There is a certain sense of levity in doing what you want to do without asking yourself if someone else did it better.

I used to derive my confidence from trying to be the best at everything I did - now I derive it from never even needing to be better than anyone. I learnt this after multiple instances of realising how doing things in ways that had felt right to me had eventually led me to more things that felt just right, for me. Measuring myself against people who were nothing like me made me do things that felt nothing like me (but I did them anyway, just because I needed to prove to myself that I could do it if I wanted to).

Lately, there has been no room for pretence or dishonesty in the way I go about my days, mostly because they’re not dictated by anyone else’s idea of how one should go about their day. I’ve had the space to experiment and let go and double down on whatever I want, without wondering what it would look like from the outside.

I’ve had the space to build a life that feels really, really good on the inside. Probably because there is no blue light at the end of the day telling me that it’s not good enough when compared to a million odd strangers on the internet.