I am a student athlete at Florida State University and I am part of a group of female athletes denominated Wild – Women In Leadership Development - that meet weekly to learn, talk and develop important skills for student athletes. There, we also discuss important values of leaders that we should apply in our daily lives. During one of those meetings, we talked about many bloggers’ Instagram pictures because of its popularity among young girls. We discussed the influence it had on multiple girls lives, who aspire to have a happy life but cannot fulfill the expectations created by popular people. Since all the members of the group are female athletes that share similar lives, with challenging schedules, managing intense practices with the academic approach and trying to excel in both of them, we face similar hardships. The stress we face daily with the high expectations from family, friends, coaches and teammates adds up to the social pressure created by the social media. On social media, most people do not make their real image public because of the influence of social pressure, so they try to portray a fake image of themselves.
Instagram is a very popular website in which bloggers make intense use of filters to post "perfect pictures" which only adds up to the already existent pressure to fit in this perfect world. Because of that, some girls came up with the idea of using the "hashtag" behind the filter for our pictures. This different subgenre for Instagram pictures came up with the intention to show the real you, the you that you do not have to change and can be proud to show the world. Posting pictures to show who you really are, without any filter or make up, doing daily things became an unusual but special new trend among my group of friends. It became so special because of its uniqueness; it is not only because those pictures are not expected to be posted on Instagram, but because they show the most important side of everyone, the inside. This is a small way we found to value each girl in our group for her special way of being. Moreover, that was a different way we found to go against the social pressure and show everyone we are proud of being who we truly are and not what others expect us to be.