TW: Emotional abuse
“I loved Instagram more than Facebook, mostly because my husband was not on it. I could use it freely. Switching to Instagram had its advantages, the crowd was different and my uncles and aunties didn’t get on it. I could post and didn’t have to worry much about censoring myself.
Then one day suddenly he started using Instagram and I still remember feeling panicked. Like I had guessed, in a couple of days he started complaining about the number of pictures I post, etc. After a few days he sent me screenshots of some of my posts calling them dirty. Those were pictures of me pouting, me in a sleeveless dress and me posing with my hairdresser. What’s so dirty? Who even defines dirty? I was heartbroken, again!
My Instagram had pictures of my daughter too, I posted them to keep certain creeps away. But he asked me to remove pictures of our daughter because they were up there with my ‘dirty pictures’. While I was asked to remove her pictures, his brother shares loads of her pictures but that’s okay. He took the matter to my dad and eventually I agreed to not post pictures of my daughter. I agreed because I thought of two things, one, yes he’s her father and two, what right do I have to upload her pictures? So now I share pictures of hers where her face is not visible.
But with my social media being so heavily policed, I feel like I have no freewill. Every single time I write a post or take a photo, I keep thinking if it will trigger him, will I be in trouble? Once, I wrote a blog post about patriarchy and he said I targeted him. WHAT! I wrote about breastfeeding and he called me an exhibitionist. I have been constantly walking on eggshells and have stopped posting about so many wonderful things because of this fear of being judged.
I have now found a way around it, I use block and restrict on Instagram but I wish I didn’t have to go through all this! If not for the policing, I would be writing about my body image issues, mental health, sexuality, posting pictures with my cleavage showing. “
