She has more than half a million followers on Instagram, but one teenager is now saying “see-ya later” to social media.
Essena O’Neil, 18, wants other to know that the life depicted in pictures is not what it seems.
She said behind her display of perfection, there was a lost and lonely life.
“I had the dream life,” she said. “I had half a million people interested in me on social media – on Instagram sorry – I had over 100,000 views on most of my videos on YouTube. To a lot of people, I made it. I was signed, I’m still technically signed with – and I don’t want to model at all anymore – one of the biggest agencies in Australia – I had one of the biggest agencies in America wanting me to sign me for my modeling and for my YouTube and I want to tell you that having it all on social media means absolutely nothing to your real life."
The Australian teenager reveals just how contrived it was in a YouTube confession.
“Everything I did was for views, was for likes,” she said.
To her followers on Instagram, O’Neil revealed the truth. The touched-up, enhanced photos of her social media life are far from real.
She wrote that “spray tan, paid promotion tea, barely any clothes. I was 15. This is what I thought was inspiring.”
The confession received a lot of support on Twitter.
O’Neill followed up her confession by posting an image that said “Confidence is not ‘They will like me,’ confidence is ‘I’ll be fine if they don’t’.”
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