I’ve Been Off Instagram For A Month

And It Feels Amazing

For those who don’t know, I used to be all over Instagram. I would probably spend a total of about 3 hours on Instagram daily- no joke. Between scrolling mindlessly through my feed to tapping through Instagram Stories, I can’t believe how much time I wasted doing nothing productive.

I had a personal IG, a medieval art account, a lame attempt at a used IG bookstore account, and even a separate book blog account. I woke up grabbing my phone and trying to juggle several conversations at once, post stories, post at least one photo a day with 30 hashtags per photo with hashtags that had not too many followers and not too few followers (the algorithm, you know).

In addition to this, I was trying to maintain a persona that, if most people I know in real life were to witness, would tell me I wasn’t being me at all. I wanted to be noticed for my intellect, my captions, my books I was reading, my carefully curated photos.

I thought having “trending content” on there would get me noticed at least among my bookstagram crowd (you can not imagine how large the IG book community is). In all actuality, even though I made tons of real-life friends, most of these people were all playing the same game I was: the game of looking like you’re interested in other people’s crap when really, you…