Some may see this as the last year of being a "child" since next year, you kind of become a legal adult. Well, I think so far there's not much difference, I have the same amount of responsibility and work and everything else. Is a day I eat too much fast food (Macs & Jollibee) and get to eat cake! However, I do think is like a milestone check to kind of tell me to look back on how far I've come in these 17 years and how different I become as each year passed. Of course, there's still the slightly shallow aspect of birthdays being a day where you get many well wishes, be it from family or friends. Surprisingly, I like it more than I expect myself to, the fact that others post birthday wishes to me on their stories or private messaging me abt it. Most of them are just quick exchanges of "happy birthday" and then "thankuu" while others were able to progress to other topics, which is something I prefer i guess. Idk why but despite all these seemingly pleasant exchanges and interactions, I still dont have a good feeling of social media... I dont like the idea of putting my personal pictures, my opinions out there for everyone to kinda see, I somehow feel naked despite having a small proportion of 200+ followers out of the 2B active users on instagram. I guess im either a private person, or a person with very low self-esteem :/ maybe a mix of both? Idk im js not very comfortable ngl, and also to add on, when i see what other ppl posts, there's this uneasy feeling when i unconsciously compare my lives to theirs. It kind of blocks out the good parts of my life and just compare their good parts to my slightly not so good parts. I think this is the negative effects of social media they always talk about. And on top of all that, endless scrolling of uneducational reels isn't a very productive task either, and hence, I've came to a conclusion at the start of the year that I'll only download back ig on occasions when I need to post smth eg yesterday. I think I might be better off without it most of the time but.. at the same time, im kind of "avoiding the problem?" instead of facing it head-on uk, and also, it deprives me of many many opportunities to reply to other's stories and start a convo with old friends. Which may be the reason why I find it hard to keep in contact with my sec sch friends since idrk whats going on in their lives. So, I drifted topic from being 17 to my thoughts on Instagram, LOL. It doesn't matter tho since this isn't a GP essay right? XD