“I have to be perfect every time I post”
March 13, 2023
“School pressure is rough,” one student wrote to the B. “And when social media is added… it’s tough to win sometimes.”
While school environments promote academic pressure, many students said social media is even more degrading. Apps like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat bombard girls with unrealistic standards, idealizing certain body types and enabling toxic comparison.
“Social media has drastically and negatively changed self image and trust,” said licensed therapist Carrie Philpott, who regularly works with teenage girls. “There’s no space in social media to say, ‘I’m having a bad day, I don’t feel good about myself’… there’s nothing like that.”
Senior Alison Saunders, who downloaded Instagram at the start of this year, immediately felt the app take a toll on her mental health.
“On the app, everyone will friend you, but then you’ll walk past them in the hallway and they’ll act like they don’t know you,” Saunders said.
Saunders said she now struggles to be genuine on the app and easily falls into the trap of “feel[ing] like I have to be perfect every time I post.”
Achieving perfection, according to the survey responses, frequently returns to physical appearance — or, as one student wrote, “the pressure to look exactly like every other girl that walks past you.”
“Knowing that you cannot change the things that you hate about yourself can cripple you into a depression that makes you want to hide your body and never want to go out and socialize with others who have a ‘better’ body than you,” another student said. “This can be so isolating and really just destroy a person.”
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