This week I chose to take a step to make my social media a more positive space. I cleared out the people that were negative, or made me feel bad in any way, or that I just didn’t really care to keep up with anymore. By unfollowing these people I am left with only those that I truly care about. With a slimmed-down amount of people I am following, my Instagram feed is shorter and I am spending less time endlessly scrolling. I am left with a feed that actually means something to me because it’s filled with my actual friends and “influencers” that are positive and inspirational.

This process was not only eyeopening because of how I felt using social media after the clear out, but also because of how I felt as I was unfollowing people. I realized how many people I followed that I don’t align morally with, or that are giving me unrealistic body examples, or just people from high school that I am not friends with and really never was. It’s eye-opening to be left with such a smaller number, but a number that I actually care to look at.

Another step in this process is disallowing people to follow me. There are so many people that were fishing for followers that I found as I unfollowed them. I don’t really want a random stranger looking for Instagram fame to be following me so I disallowed them to follow me. In doing so I lost followers, but honestly, I  could care less. I got Instagram so much later than my peer resulting in it to be nearly impossible to have as many followers as them. This is liberating honestly. It’s such a lost cause that I don’t have to or want to pay attention to it. So for those random people I removed from my small collection of followers, I guess I’m doing you a favour of your own social media clear out because I can guarantee you could care less about what I’m up to, and I could care less about how many followers I have.

The crazy part of all of this is that I did this at the beginning of the summer too. I thought I cleared out everybody that I didn’t want, but I was lying to myself. It was a baby step, and there were great changes that I will talk about later when I research body image, but I was still left with some that I thought I still cared about. But here I am, a few months later, doing it all over again, because I realized that social media needs to be a positive space, and I can be the one that makes it that way. It not always up to the influencer to speak to the masses, but instead partly up to the consumer to chose what they want to listen to, and from who they want to hear it.

I would suggest that everyone should do this. Social media doesn’t need to look the same for everyone, and it shouldn’t. Make it a healthy, happy, and inspirational place, where you can connect to people you truly care about.