Why I’m Taking a Break from Instagram

As a blogger and as a personal user, it used to be my favorite social media app. So what led to me taking a break from Instagram?

Instagram was my favorite social media app long before I made an account for my blog. I loved the ease of keeping in touch with friends, especially those with kids, even though we’re spread across the country. I loved how low maintenance it all seemed compared to the rampant drama that often dominated my Facebook newsfeed. This might sound a little cheesy, but I also loved the sense of encouragement and community my followers and I had cultivated.

Then I set up my blog account. I shared personal photos there, too, and I mostly stopped posting on my personal account. I still enjoyed the stress-free aspect of snapping a quick picture to give my followers a behind-the-scenes peek at my life or to promote a recent blog post.

So why have I all but abandoned the site for the last six months? I recently asked myself the same question, and here’s what I came up with:

Why I’m Taking a Break from Instagram

I don’t want to “curate” anything

If you’re a blogger who has paid any attention to posts about ways to grow your Instagram following, you’ve likely come across the idea of “curating” your feed. Do you know what curate means? It means “to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation.” This suggestion says that you should be incredibly intentional about the photos you post. You should choose a “look” you want- simplistic, colorful, stark, bright, abstract, homey- and only choose photos that meet that criteria.

But I don’t want to curate anything. My Instagram feed isn’t a museum and I don’t want to put that much thought and effort into creating the perfect square to present to the world. I don’t want to strip my account of any personality and make it a cookie cutter of what others say the perfect Instagram feed should look like.

My feed can’t look like those

Truth: even if I wanted a streamlined feed with beautifully composed photos, I can’t do that. Those accounts post gorgeous photo after gorgeous photo and I’m not capable of taking photos of that caliber. Sure, given the right light and my trusty Nikon, I can snap images that I’m pretty proud of. But quick on-the-fly photos with my iPhone? Yeah, those are going to look like they were taken on-the-fly with my iPhone.

I don’t have the time, the desire, or the ability to take photos with a regular camera and go through the process of editing and transferring them to my phone, so my feed will never look like those perfect ones. I’d like to be able to effortlessly take professional-looking pictures, but I can’t.

I want it to be real

One of my biggest goals in blogging is to be authentic. Posting perfectly cropped and edited photos wouldn’t be real. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely edit every photo that goes up on this site, and I almost always use an app to edit the photos I post on Instagram. But my life doesn’t contain perfect lighting and a themed color scheme, so if my feed did, it wouldn’t be a reflection of me.

I’m not for a second suggesting that bloggers who curate their feeds aren’t being authentic. I know there are plenty of bloggers who naturally take awesome photos and who have an eye for styling a photo. That’s not me, though, and giving in to the pressure I feel to try to be like that would negate all I’ve tried to do in the name of authenticity and honesty.

Until I can figure out how to reconcile my need to be authentic with my desire to post quality photos, I’m taking a break from Instagram.

Have you ever taken a break from social media?