By this I don’t mean, “I hope he thinks I’m pretty” or “I hope she thinks I’m cool enough to invite to her party”. I mean more abstract worries that are even further out of my control. Worries such as, “My best friend is upset, what have I done?” Or “My lecturer didn’t look at me this morning, did I do something wrong?” This speaks very clearly to my anxiety about how much effect and influence I have on other people. It stresses me deeply and is quite a pervasive experience. I can’t seem to go through one day without worrying that I am the source of other people’s misery, misfortunate, or distress. 

This places immense pressure on me to be a kind of social chameleon: I change my colours and adapt to different social situations in order to be the kind of person different people need me to be so that I don’t upset them or leave them feeling deserted. When I am on my own, however, I don’t know what kind of person to be for myself. I am exhausted at the end of the day after being different people for everyone else around me:

Happy Sarah-Kate who will laugh at the joys and mishaps of daily life with you.
Comforting Sarah-Kate who will talk with you till all hours of the morning about your worries.
Care-free Sarah-Kate who will go for drinks with you.
Patient and Understanding Sarah-Kate who will stay with you until you feel more relaxed and calm.

Even so, I still manage to convince myself and fill my head with terrible thoughts that the problems of everyone around me are somehow my fault. If I see my friend looking upset on the bus, I will think it is because I offended them in some way. If my mom doesn’t say hello to me in a friendly tone, I will think that I made her angry or frustrated. I place so much pressure on myself to be just the right temperature for other people to avoid conflict that I believe I inevitably start.



What I have come to realize after countless, and often circular, therapy sessions is that the misfortunes of people are not my fault. I genuinely overestimate how much of an influence I have over other people, and I don’t know why. All I know is the liberating truth that most times it is not me, it’s you. I am working more and more towards liberating myself from the bullying side of my brain that tells me that the world’s problems rest on my existence and that I need to make myself small and likeable in order to keep the peace. How is that fair? How is fair for me to assume blame for the burdens of other people that have nothing to do with me? If my tutor gives me the side-eye glance, maybe they just had a bad morning, left the house late, or even had a fight with their parents, and NOT because I have done something wrong to them. If my friend doesn’t wave back at me, maybe it’s because they really didn’t see me or they aren’t feeling their best, and NOT because I made them feel angry or upset.

I feel like I am continuously retraining my brain to question my coping mechanisms, unhealthy behaviours, and my previously unquestioned views of myself and the world around me. I don’t, however, see this as a burden or punishment. Everyday I am becoming a stronger and more enlightened version of myself as I learn, discover, unlearn, and reimagine ways of becoming the best possible version of myself, for myself. I find my mental state becomes stronger the more I question why I treat myself so badly and place immense pressure on myself to be perfect. Thought it is incredibly daunting and difficult to interrogate your own mind on what it is convinced to be true, you  will also come to realize how mentally constructed feelings of worthlessness are, and that they can be dismantled by you, the true commander of your worth.

I recently went through something that caused me to take three major steps back and re-evaluate the way I treat people. I asked myself the following questions: 

“Am I a genuinely good person?” 

“Do I emit the authentic and caring vibes I want to receive?” 

“How can I preach friendship and care when I can barely look inside myself and show myself the same love?"

Often times the source of my discomfort and disbelief in myself and my abilities comes from social media. Social media, for me, has become a crutch. I have started using it as a tool to remind myself I am alive, to validate my existence through affirmation from other people, and to remind myself I am a good person by posting an inspirational quote. This has resulted in my life becoming an illusion, a fantasy. The picture I post in a single moment capturing a still shot becomes the defining aspect of my entire day. I become nothing more than a two-dimensional representation of the world I long to live in: A world filled with shocking blue Huji skies, VSCO iced coffees, puppies and sunflowers that aren't mine, and Pinterest pasta.

But of course there is the behind-the-scenes of social media: The messy bits, the crying fits, the bloated tummies, the bitten nails, the pimples, the scars, the bursts of rage... The colourful and mundane things we all experience but that are not "aesthetically pleasing" enough for social media. So what do we do with those moments? We suppress them, we delete them, we put filters on them, and we hide them from the world. I truly believe that this is the source of millennial and gen Z unhappiness: We have stopped living for pleasure and have started living for people through our growing obsession with social media. The likes, the shoutouts, the follows... we crave affirmation that we are alive, that we are good enough, and that our bodies are the right size.

I became obsessed with Instagram. I was one of those people who laughed at my friends who had a menagerie of editing apps on their phone for their Instagram photos: One for layouts, one for collages, one for adding just the right amount of saturation to make them look tanned. In reality, I was one of those girls too. I scheduled when I was going to post my pictures, what my captions would be, what hashtags I would use, and stressed over the minute details of posting the picture. I wondered how people would think of me if I posted a bikini pic, and whether or not I was pretentious for making my caption a lyric from a song I’d never heard before. Endless questions about my appearance and existence was handed to strangers across the screen and taken completely out of my control. I lost who I was entirely.




Comparing myself to strangers on Instagram became inevitable. Instagram models are among the 0.01% of women whose bodies runway-ready. But when I was a teenager and first starting on Instagram, I was prepubescent with no boobs or hips to speak of. Seeing these women and their attraction, popularity, and success all stemming from their beautifully toned bodies hit me harder than anything else could have at that tender age. I began idealising these women for the wrong reasons: Not because of their success, entrepreneurship, or their confidence, but for their bodies which I had always wanted. I craved the attention and glamour that their beautiful bodies afforded them. I wanted all that they had. I wanted to be bronzed, curvy, shiny, sleek, and overflowing with confidence. Instead I felt awkward, unnoticed, insecure, and unworthy.

I have found that sense of doubting myself, my recovery, and how far my body has gotten me comes back the more I post on Instagram. This is where the cycle starts:

The more I feel insecure, the more I post to make myself feel validated and 'heard'. But the more I post, the more insecure I feel about what I see other people doing and accomplishing on Instagram.

I was posting up to three times a day, spending hours on the explore page, and following model after model planning how efficiently and sneakily I would diet to lose just enough weight to feel just like them, but not so much so that I would relapse into anorexia.




I forced myself to step out of myself and look critically at my social media habits. I was seeking external validation to correct something inside me that felt wrong, out of place, and unlovable. I realised that that is where my eating disorder stems from too: Something inside me becomes bitter, and I begin to seek something external to manipulate instead of examining the problem as rooted inside me. With my eating disorder, the external thing I manipulated as food. With feeling insecure about my body and becoming conflicted about my self image and values, the external thing I manipulated was my Instagram. I put rosy filters and creative captions on square and static images of my life to try and fool myself that I was happy with the person  becoming: A person lived for social media.




So I stopped Instagramming which was incredibly hard initially. I felt what can only be described as social media withdrawals. That is when I saw just how obsessed with Instagram I was. I kicked myself into action by buying a new journal and writing myself a manifesto about who I wanted to become in this period of 'Instagram Abstinence'. I imagined the ideal version of myself, and after at least three more kinder and realistic versions of this, I penned down the kinds of values and vibes I wanted to emanate on my own without needing the rest of the world on my side.

I wanted to live for moments, not people. I wanted the freedom to read without checking my phone, of moving my body without taking selfies of my outfit, of eating a meal without feeling terrible afterwards by looking at pictures of stick-thin models. I wanted to know who I was by spending time with myself, not by scrolling through my Instagram feed to remind myself of who I was. Because those frozen moments forever archived on Instagram are not real life. They are stillness, not real life. They are static, not real life. Real life is falling, growing, gaining weight, finding love, healing, sweating, bleeding, and bruising. Real life is wildly tragic and insanely powerful. And that is what I am trying to experience in all its messiness right now.