I deactivated my facebook account last year because they refused to remove a video of kitten being put in a bucket, doused in petrol and lit on fire. I wish I could say I deleted it but considering the fact you have to put in a legal request for an account to be deleted when someone dies, I think I did ok. I still have instagram though, which is owned by facebook and makes me a hypocritical bitch. I just love the way the filters make my cats look and nothing is being set alight.

I didn't really think anything of it when I did delete it - I put up a status announcing that I wouldn't be available on there anymore, which probably sounds very self-indulgent and self-important but it was just to let people know my contact details so that I wouldn't fall out of contact with people. I did still fall out of contact with people but that's neither here nor there. I thought I'd miss it more, but I really didn't. A few days of going to open the app on my phone due to force of habit were about it - after that it just wasn't a part of my life anymore.

I now realise just how venomous a website like facebook could be. I've had a pretty exciting life and there are a lot of good things about it, but when I had facebook I would sit and troll through every page of people I went to high school and university with and see that they were doing nothing but amazing things. Travelling, becoming self-employed, getting promotions, experiencing things that almost everyone has on their bucket list and they were the same age as me and here I was living with my parents and working at a sixth form college in a job that I kinda hated and why couldn't I be as amazing as them?

The problem with social media accounts like facebook and also instagram is that they trivialise what would usually be huge, life changing moments and make them appear to be regular, daily activities. When you see regular people regularly achieving great feats of life your life seems terrible in comparison, which of course it would! If your old maths buddy had started travelling around the world and posted on facebook that they're going to be waking up at 05:45am tomorrow morning and making their way to Japan and you know you've got to get up tomorrow at 05:45am so you can catch the bus to go to work in Lowestoft because you don't have enough money to learn how to drive and buy a car? Your life is going to seem shitty. Even if it's not! But when you see life changing occasions regularly and the people experiencing them act as if it's just another day at the office, it's foolish to think you won't automatically make comparisons to your own life that are so detrimental in the long term. I know I did, constantly. And it often made me unhappy when actually my position in life was pretty great. I realise that now, of course but it took me a long, long time.

I stopped following a lot of people on instagram once I'd had this mini-epiphany. I only follow close friends and family and some tattoo artists whose work I drool over on the reg and I'm much happier for it. I suppose I should get rid of it really, but I just really love showing off my cats, they're so badass and beautiful. My boyfriend recently said that I miss out on a lot because I don't have facebook, which I think about sometimes. Mostly though I just don't see the point of it now.