It seems like everyone, their mother, and their cat are using Tiktok these days, but while I used to, I don’t anymore, for multiple reasons. Here’s a recounting of my fun and funky Tiktok journey!
I got Tiktok a week into quarantine last year (so mid-March 2020), as a means to occupy myself with all the free time we suddenly had. It didn’t take long for me to start making my own videos, and a video I made about the apps on my old iPad got me a bit more than 50,000 views in early April. It was a great ego-boost, and I kept making videos while scrolling through my For-You-Page until four a.m. every night. Afterward, I had a couple of other videos go moderately viral, but I didn’t “blow up” in any sense of the word. My most viewed video ended up with about 150,000 views, which, by Tiktok standards, is not a lot.
As time went on, and I spent more and more time on Tiktok, I began to feel more and more subconscious, and subsequently worse and worse about myself. There were two reasons why: first, I couldn’t find a niche to grow my platform, and second, I kept comparing myself to everyone on the app who did.
There’s nobody to blame or anything for the lack-of-found-niche thing, but it’s kind of a given that on Tiktok, in order to succeed, you need to find your audience, and I couldn’t do that. I could accept not being able to make people laugh or make people impressed, but when I started to think I wasn’t pretty enough, things started to feel worse.
I’ve always had difficulty categorizing myself and my personality, but “alt-girl” is probably the closest I’ll get to a term other people will recognize and identify with, given my music taste and how I view the world. But the other alt-girls on Tiktok who listened to the same music as I did seemed unlike me to my insecure self. They were all stunningly gorgeous, with perfect makeup and badass clothes, and they all had posters all over their walls. Most had romantic partners, too, which for a long time was something I craved. Everyone seemed to love them and their content, and it felt like nobody liked me or mine in comparison. That’s how any social media–if you allow it to affect you the way I let Tiktok affect me–will make you feel.
I’d had this problem before, with Instagram, but I wasn’t trying to build a following there like I was on Tiktok. I hated comparing myself to other people all the time, especially other women, so this past January, I quit the app for good. I went back sporadically a few times, to find an account, or a saved video, or remove some videos I’d posted, but I don’t spend my hours scrolling through my FYP anymore.
If any social media is making you feel as negatively about yourself as I allowed TikTok to make me feel, the best thing you can do is remove yourself and delete the app. This is, of course, easier said than done, but if you can put that level of focus into anything else–preferably something healthier for you, mentally or otherwise–then it will help you stop feeling the harmful effects. I’m grateful I quit TikTok and I don’t see myself using it again, even though I think (at least I hope!) I have a much better perception of myself now.