I removed all of my Instagram followers to feel free to be authentically me

Tonight I removed all of my followers on Instagram. It was a private account with some 200+ followers, but I admit, removing most of them actually hurt. I did it, because Instagram was no longer the social media I began using in July 2012.

In the beginning I would only post pictures of our every day life. Whenever my children were in the photos, I would photograph them so that you couldn't see their faces. Then somewhere in the middle I turned my then public account into a private one and started to share more open content. Over the years I've posted nearly 4000 pictures of our every day life.

In the end I realized I was looking at the number of people liking my posts rather than the posts and trying to understand why the adorable picture of my kid got three likes, or the actually very beautiful picture of a make-believe satellite received full two likes, while someone's black and white picture of a cake - that would be impossible to understand was cake without the description - gathered 1200 likes.

Yesterday, out of the blue, I saw a picture I had published back in October 2016 on the official Instagram account of Delft. My picture was being credited to another Instagram user. I went to look for the original photo, I sent a link to Delft account and a message to the imposter explaining it was my photo. I was happy people really thought it was beautiful, but I was unhappy people were copying and sharing it as their own. It wasn't even the first time.

The imbalance of not having anyone pay attention to what I was putting out there and then having people actually stealing what I was putting out there had me in tears. "FUCK PEOPLE! FUCK THE WORLD!" I literally shouted to my husband, who was trying to understand why, once again, I was so unhappy. I was, am, unhappy for having done all the work and someone else was harvesting any credit coming out of it. It's not like I just always happened to be there in a beautiful moment. It was about being there and managing to capture it, too.

This picture of my daughter plane spotting upside-down gathered a full seven likes, out of which four were from my immediate family. It made me question whether or not it was a good picture to begin with. Was I just thinking it was, because it was my daughter and I had took it?

My husband suggested fishing for likes. Liking other people's content more to have more likes, but I wasn't in it to change who I was. Of course I would like most of the pictures I saw in my feed, because those are pictures of people I know and it's great to follow their lives like this, but I wouldn't go out of my way to get more likes. If people didn't like the authentic me, I would not change who I was to have people accept me better. I even thought that if I was a prettier girl, people would like my posts better. Me, a 33-year-old mother of three who is most of the time happy what she sees in the mirror was now questioning her own looks. One thing I've learned so far is that whenever I'm feeling or experiencing something, I'm definitely not the only one, even if I'm the only one talking about it. This to all social media users: you do not have to be an ounce more. You are good as you are, because absolutely no one else could be doing what you're doing: being you!

In the end I looked at my followers. Most of them my friends, some of them people I only knew through Instagram over the years and I deleted them all. If I were to add more photos, I were to do it for the same reasons as in the beginning: to document my life and the life of my kids. No one had to see it, and actually I'd be happier not having to think about who saw it and how they might be using whatever they saw.

I am still going to post, but only for myself. I will still continue to share a fraction of my photos, as I've done so far, on mediums such as Facebook or Twitter, but most of the content from now on will be only for me.