Social media may equal unhappiness, but it’s not all bad.

It’s actually pretty amazing when you think about it. Really.

I created my things.are.lovely Instagram account two years ago to… well… I’m still not sure.

Way back when Instagram started, I jumped on the train pretty quickly. It was a small community of people each sharing overly-edited pictures an unholy amount of times per day. Most of us probably didn’t know another soul using the app, so it was arguably more common for strangers to be interacting with each other, commenting on photos, and following humans we knew nothing about because we didn’t have any actual friends to connect with in that space.

It was a new concept for me – a social media site where it’s perfectly acceptable to befriend and interact with complete strangers. A place where you’re not reaching for your frying pan if someone with zero mutual acquaintances wants to befriend you as you might would on Facebook, but slightly more warm and personal than Twitter. The freedom to share how much or how little you want with no repercussions, because none of these people know a thing about you that you don’t tell them. The uniqueness of being anonymously known.

As the months went by, some of my friends started joining Instagram, but I had grown so comfortable with my tiny online community that I was reluctant to accept any kind of change. My account stayed unknown for a few more months until I accidentally mentioned it one day, and once one friend found me there, all of them did.

It was different from that point forward. I can’t fully explain how, but I felt more restrained in what I was allowed to post. The app no longer gave me a world-view but shrank down to a Facebook-wannabe, local-hometown-friend level. I was more self-conscience about what others thought. It was a constant balancing act between trying to keep my life looking as equally exciting as my friends’, but not coming across as too pretentious. Of trying to let my creativity loose, while also remaining recognizable or ‘in character’ for my usual behavior. My teenage insecurities were real.

I’m being a little dramatic here. I mean, I still had fun. It was still my favorite app. I still posted regularly. I still had a good time drawing new people into my circle. But even after several years into it, the nostalgia for those first few months lingered. I missed the feeling of posting for me instead of my friends.

So one day, completely on a whim, I created another account. It wasn’t ever supposed to be anything. I just thought maybe if I could give myself a place way off by myself to do my own thing, I would either:

a. feel personally fulfilled

b. realize it was all just a rosy nostalgia built on a distorted memory of “better times”

Either way, it was a side project, and my personal account was definitely going to remain my go-to.

Months went by, and I did feel more fulfilled. Much to my surprise, new people started following me, commenting on things, and sending me messages. The old sense of wide-spread community I had originally gotten from the app started coming back. The account that was never meant to be anything started taking the place of my personal one.

It didn’t take long before I stopped posting on my personal one altogether. I changed the settings to private and stopped accepting new followers. Only my two closest in-person friends know about this side-project-of-an-account, all the rest are from Instagramland.

I’ve had time to choreograph my groove and tune my voice here, and I think my personal insecurities are loosening up enough to where inviting more people I know into this part of my world wouldn’t bother me as much, but I think I’ll leave it be. My friends remain connected to my other account, and I go check up on them every now and then, but I mostly keep off social media when it comes to my personal life. If you need me, send me a text. If you want to catch up, let’s get coffee.

This entire self-conscience journey of social media has taught me a ton about myself, but I’ve also learned so much about the world. About humans as a species. About behavior, respect, trust, and vulnerability.

Fifty years ago, casually contacting a stranger from the other side of the earth at the snap of a finger was unheard of. Average personal worlds were so much smaller then. We forget we literally have the entire planet at our fingertips.

You turn on the news and hear these terrible things about certain countries. We’re only told about them politically as a whole, but subconsciously we develop a wariness towards the people living in them because good people can’t live in ‘bad’ countries. Instagram gives you the opportunity to interact with these people who you’re told are supposed to be your enemies, and they really are just like you. We all feel the same things. We’re all searching for how to best fulfill the same basic needs. Some of the kindest people I’ve ever met live in countries the US isn’t exactly besties with. I’m no pacifist, but the idea of going to war against these individuals breaks my heart. The world isn’t faceless; it’s full of nice, ordinary people who want to know and understand you as much as you’d like to know and understand them.

I’ve gotten to see first-hand how your own behavior affects the people you attract and how you’re treated. We come from different cultural, religious, educational, and political backgrounds, but we find commonalities. I’ve spoken to a lot of people throughout the two years here, and not a single one of them has been remotely disrespectful; a phenomenon I wish was more common for the internet.

All in all, I can be rather cynical sometimes, but I think I truly do believe that the vast majority of people are inherently good. The haters yell louder than the lovers, and the echoes of shattering windows linger in the quiet still of the night more intrusively than the tinkering concentration of all the ones creating the stained glass.

Give yourself the freedom to post for you and not your friends.

Use social media as a way to go out of your comfort zone and interact with wildly different people.

Treat others as you’d like to be treated.

Find the good in others and believe that it is so.

Keep loving even when it’s hard; even when it hurts.

Keep building your stained glass. If someone throws a rock through it, pick up the pieces, and we’ll start again.

Sometimes, a fresh start is exactly what you need.