Triggers, Part II: Social Media

Whenever I post on social media I want Likes. I have a routine when it comes to checking if/how many I get: I post whatever I want to post then quickly closeout the app or website, do something else for a few minutes, then compulsively check again, and then again, and then again. It's a depressing cycle I seem to assess in absolutes. If I'm getting likes, I feel great. If I'm not, I feel like shit. And that's so fucking unhealthy.

Before I knew what direction I wanted to take this project, I used social media (Instagram) as an exposure therapy tool. I had removed myself from social media for about two years after I got sick because I couldn't think of a worse way to manage my mental health than consciously or otherwise comparing virtual lives with others using arbitrary Likes as data points. But the urge to produce some kind of content and engage with others eventually became overwhelming. So I posted as frequently as possible, with very limited marketing, about some of the most mundane shit. I didn't want the lack of engagement to keep me from doing something I enjoyed. I was documenting my life in recovery and it was meant to be boring, but I didn't want to come out and say that.

From a purely analytics perspective, my content sucks. I rarely get more than a few likes on any photo and my stories seldom approach 30 visible Views. The stories take me about 30 to 45 minutes to create and my photos take about 10 to 15 minutes to edit. It's a lot of work with relatively little social return. It's forced me to ask: who am I doing this for?

The answer is me. I publish at the rate of an Instagram "Influencer" and write the way I do because it makes me feel good. I like being creative. I pay attention to the Likes and the Views because humans are conditioned to do so, and it's not bad to want people to like your content. But social media triggers me because it makes me feel like I need the validation of others before I can feel good about myself. Creatively, that's the worst thing I can do.

I fight back against the feeling of inadequacy by publishing more content the way I want to, deliberately fighting off the voices in my head that tell me I suck if X amount of people don't like my content or follow me. If I'm only creating and writing for other people, I shouldn't be doing this.