It’s Not You, It’s Me

“I’ve officially broken up with engagement on social impacting how I feel about myself. “

My journey with social media is… questionable to say the least. But in my years of utilizing a multitude of social platforms, I have only recently understood that my relationship with them as a whole has been incredibly unhealthy. Let’s start from the beginning.

I was not allowed to have an instagram of my own until I was 15. My parents made it blatantly clear that I was not to have one until they gave me their explicit “go ahead,” so I (impatiently) waited for it. It wasn’t until my adult years that I fully grasped why they made me wait so long. My parents had enough understanding about my self-esteem tying very heavily to how others viewed me. They knew that putting myself in front of more people would only amplify this tendency and most likely make me feel worse about myself.

I’ll admit, I still struggle a bit with my confidence as an adult, so I know it could have only been one hundred times worse in my adolescent years — especially from the perception of a parent. I deeply appreciate their desire to protect me from myself. Unfortunately though, they were correct about the amplification of my low-self esteem in direct relation to being on social media.

When I started my instagram, of course the main goal was to get as many followers as possible. But because I was so “late to the game,” I was starting at a huge deficit. My friends had a few thousand followers while I was only at a few hundred and that messed with me. Not too seriously, because I had much bigger self-confidence giants to battle in high school, but the frustration with it was there. Every now and again I would hear a joke about my follower count from a peer who has had instagram since they were ten years old, but I don’t remember too many so it must not have been that much.

Fast forward a bit to my junior year, a friend of mine wanted to start over with instagram and was willing to give me his old account. The user had about two thousand followers at that time so I leapt at the opportunity. I had plans to use this new platform to launch my Youtube from. And SupaDaij was born!

Then I started to do the acting thing a bit more seriously and posted reels about that and it soon turned into viral videos everyday and thousands of new followers. There was a a period of like a month, maybe two, where if I posted a video and it took more than ten minutes to reach ten thousand views, I would get concerned. I had genuinely tied how many views and likes I got to how I felt about myself and at that point I didn’t even recognize it. Instagram started to give out bonuses (payment) for the amount of views a creator gets in a month and that really solidified that need to get a lot of views and a lot of likes, engagement, etc.

Eventually, Instagram paused the bonuses and I took that as a sign to just stop. So I went from posting everyday, to disappearing for months. I remember there being a point where I was afraid to post again because I just knew the views wouldn’t be the same. Looking back on that time, that’s actually insane to me that I had such a deep fear of putting myself back out there creatively because I knew my view count would be low. It hurts me for younger Daijah that I felt so fervently that my worth was tied to how much engagement I got on a post.

So for a very long time, I struggled with posting. I would put something up and then be angry or upset when it didn’t do “well”. It would be a hard blow to my self esteem when my audience didn’t engage. I was honestly concerned that people would think that I bought my followers and that thought alone made me anxious. This cycle of posting a few times, not seeing the return on engagement I was looking for, and losing momentum continued for quite a while. And I knew I wasn’t supposed to care about the likes and views, but for some reason I had a difficult time figuring out how to stop.

Fast forward to right before 2026 started. I had recently completed a 30 day posting challenge that was designed to stretch that posting and not caring muscle. When I finished, I had kind of a “Ok, now what?” moment and that’s when the Lord gave me understanding.

Keep going.

I have known for a while that part of my purpose is to tell my story and help others find their own by doing so. But I had dragged my feet on it for so long, tried to curate plan after plan that I didn’t feel like would end in low views or engagement, that I had lost sight of the point of my existence on social media. To create.

Through my own creativity, I’m meant to tell my story. Whoever the story reaches, is who it is meant to reach. This year, I’ve been able to let go of that nagging feeling that low views equals low value simply by reminding myself that I am walking in my purpose. I have been able to completely alter my relationship with social media in these last three months by just creating and putting it out there. I’m living in a space I’m calling “JUST DO IT.” I’m just doing stuff — just creating, being myself, and sharing without burdening myself with the thought that the amount of people seeing my creations is an indication of it being good or not.

And truthfully, it has been freeing. I’ve officially broken up with engagement on social impacting how I feel about myself.

For the first time in a long time, social media doesn’t feel like a scoreboard I’m constantly checking. It feels like a canvas again. A place where I can document, experiment, laugh at myself, share things I’m learning, and sometimes even fail publicly without it meaning anything about my worth.

The numbers are still there. The likes still show up (or don’t). The views still fluctuate. But they no longer have the authority to determine how I feel about myself or the value of what I create.

I’m telling my story in real time — imperfectly and without having everything figured out first. And oddly enough, that’s what makes it meaningful.

Because if someone else who is struggling with their confidence, their purpose, or their relationship with social media happens to come across something I’ve shared and feels a little less alone, then the post did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Not everything we create needs to go viral to have value.

Sometimes the real win is simply pressing “post.”