“I fell in love with this idea that I could be of value to other people,” she wrote. “Let’s call this my snowballing addiction to be liked by others.”
Many young girls completely looked up to O’Neil and were even obsessed with her. Little did they know that behind that pretty face, she was totally unhappy.
“Yeah 16-year-old Essena would have been like ‘WTF girl you have the dream life,’” she wrote. “So why did I feel so lost, lonely and miserable?”
Very recently O’Neil decided that she had completely had enough and realized that she wan’t living an authentic life. She then decided to make a drastic change in her life and announced to her followers that she is quitting social media, and she has already begun editing all of the captions on her photos to tell the truth behind the pictures.
Not only has she deleted her Tumblr account, but she plans to stop posting on YouTube as well. She has also deleted over 2,000 pictures from her Instagram account; she says they served no real purpose other than self-promotion.
She also went as far as to admit that her “hot body” shots were the results of unhealthy habits…
“Without realizing, I’ve spent majority of my teenage life being addicted to social media, social approval, social status and my physical appearance,” she wrote. “Social media, especially how I used it, isn’t real.”
She also opened up about how she was making money from some of her posts and was completely honest about how there were no actual “candid” photos, they were all staged and even photoshopped.
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