Fourth of July celebrates how America gained its freedom. This Fourth of July I gained my own kind of freedom. I was a social media queen and boy was I proud of it! My Snapchat stories were minimum of 40 seconds a day and on special occasions over 100. I posted on twitter about 5 times a day and retweeted more then I can even recall. I Instagramed every three days and that was just what I personally did. I scrolled and scrolled for hours. I stalked so hard that I would find out how my ex’s new girlfriend’s best friend was doing. Well you get the gist, I was obsessed.
I soon began to see the effects of my obsession. I felt this emptiness inside that I would try and fill with all the likes from my recent selfie. My self-esteem was lacking because I was comparing myself constantly to everyone on all my timelines. My closest friends were always yelling at me to put down my phone and would half joke, half not joke, about staging an intervention. I knew I had to calm down a bit but I didn’t know exactly how and, if I'm going to be honest, I was really scared.
So here is how I overcame the obsession. The friends that were always nagging me to put down my phone invited me to their parents house for the Fourth of July weekend. There would be plenty of food, beer, a pool and of course the company of good friends. Sounds perfect right? Well they live in the middle of no where so their house is secluded from society and they get no cell service. NONE. It was the perfect scenario to force me to stop for a second; at least I would be surrounded by friends in my time of need.
Once I was there it was fine; I honestly didn’t think about not being able to update my apps. However, as the day wore on, that little evil voice in my head starting getting louder and louder. “Repost, Reblog, Retweet, Repeat” it yelled! The harder it screamed the harder I gripped on to my friends. The second night was when I had a revelation that will forever change my outlook on life.
After two days of not being able to see what the outside world was doing I realized I had not died. I know, I was shocked too! I also realized that I was actually having a fun time even though no one knew what I was doing at that moment. That night I had the epiphany, I started looking over my life and thinking of all my memories; I realized I was remembering memories I hadn’t even thought about in a while. That’s when it hit me. I spent so much time trying to make every selfie perfect, ever snap story look like I was having a great time, and every tweet even wittier then my last; but in a year would I even remember the moment I was talking about on my media? No, because I was spending too much time documenting it rather then living in the moment. So why do we try to make every moment so perfect? Instead lets just live our lives and enjoy the experience.
This queen is very happy she got dethroned.
~ Amanda Gonyer
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