I quit participating in this part of social media

Or, I got in my feelings about my microwave (of all things) and I decided it was time for a change

This is for anyone who has been personally victimized by the social media comparison game. (I mean, isn’t that everyone?)

I started sharing photos of our home on social media in February of 2021. Like most people in and around 2020, I took to the internet for connection and escape. This coupled with a year-long maternity leave was the perfect recipe for taking on a new passion project.

We had moved in the previous June, and I was slowly decorating and settling in. In one of many inspiration searches on Pinterest, I happened upon a major home decor Instagram account and thought to myself—hey, I could do that. It would be cool to document the evolution of our home.

So I used nap time to stage photos (or “shoot content,” as they say). I researched social media posting strategies, which I knew absolutely nothing about. I started sharing, figured it out along the way, made friends, and even landed some pretty great brand collab deals for a small account. It was mostly fun, and I still share casually to this day.

The aforementioned microwave.

I genuinely love decorating our house for the purpose of making it a cozy, inviting, and beautiful place. The more time I spent in the home decor corner of Instagram, the more beautifully curated images of homes I saw. I got a lot of inspiration from those images, and I learned a lot about interior design.

But.

Eventually, the way I saw my home started to change. I started trying to optimize and improve every corner of it, often to make it more Instagram-worthy, rather than because I actually wanted (or had the bandwidth) to change something. I fixated on what set our house apart from the homes I was scrolling through, like the paint colors on the walls or the fact that our microwave was visible in our kitchen.

See, most of these gorgeous, high-end kitchens had hidden microwaves. They were locked away in a cabinet like an ogre or a troll due to unsightliness.

Much to my dismay, my microwave is front and center, right above our oven. I didn’t know to hate this until now. Imagine my shock, my horror!

I felt inadequate and silly all at once.

These feelings, and more like them, stuck around for quite a while. Eventually, though, with some distance from the app (brought about by having my second baby, going back to work, and having absolutely zero time for anything, let alone posting on social media and subsequently obsessing over it), I found that my attitude toward it was changing.

I hadn’t consciously tried to change my mind, either. It was one of those quiet, gradual, subtle changes that happen in the background—the kind that you have no idea about and then suddenly, all at once, you realize you feel very differently than before.

Time away from mindlessly scrolling (and comparing) created space for me to remember why I started sharing our home in the first place: I wanted to document the process of settling in and making our house ours. I didn’t share because I wanted tens of thousands of followers or because I wanted to make money. When I realized I could do a little bit of those things, though, I started running in a race that I never signed up for. (Which I never would do in the first place, because I hate running.)

I still enjoy hanging out on Instagram. I’ve made some lovely friends over there, and I like seeing what they post (they are so talented!), being inspired, and sharing some of our home, too, when I have the time. Now, I share purely when inspiration strikes. I post when I want to share, not because I’m trying to meet a self-imposed posting schedule or please the algorithm. (I’ve never been good at that, anyway.)

Limiting my time on social media has exponentially reduced how much I care about my success on that app (and others) or how popular my own decor choices are.

This is the secret.

I do better in every area of my life when I care less. I know this seems so, so weird. We should care, right?

The problem is this: I am an anxious over-carer. It is in my nature to care, a lot, about nearly everything. This kind of over-caring often completely obscures my intuition; I can’t hear or see it when I am caring so, so loudly. I will should myself into a lot of choices my intuitive self would never, ever make. By quieting my anxious voice, I can make confident choices rooted in that intuition, which I trust immensely. (She doesn’t give a sh!t about likes on the internet. 🙃)

Social media is wonderful for self-expression. For creativity. For connection. For friendship. And it’s hard to get those things out of it when we are caught up in the game of comparing our progress to others’, racing for the most likes and comments and shares.

And I get it: it’s nearly impossible not to care. It’s human nature to want the acknowledgment and approval of our fellow humans. But for me, at least, once I truly stopped caring so much, I enjoyed social media again. And, arguably, sharing from a sure, grounded place is likely to lead to that growth that everyone wants.

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As for our microwave, it’s staying. I cannot imagine intentionally creating extra steps to get to our most-used appliance. Here, function is beating form, hands down.

Will I maybe invest in a prettier microwave at some point? Probably. Hey, I’m only human.