NC teen turns social media addiction into something positive
Keegan Lee couldn’t put her phone down.
Not at the dinner table, surrounded by her mom, dad and younger sister, Kohen. Not at her desk — it always had to be on and face up, beside her animal figurines and on top of Lee’s stack of handwritten letters. Not even while she ran, constantly grasping for it in her pocket.
She couldn’t miss a notification. Who was trying to reach her? What were her friends doing? Did someone unfollow her Instagram account? Was it because she hadn’t posted anything in a few weeks? Who commented on her last post, anyway? She might as well check, and look at Snapchat, and maybe TikTok, too, while she’s at it.
“It was all-consuming,” Lee said of what she now realizes was the beginning of what would become a nearly yearlong social media addiction.
Lee, now a first-year Copeland Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill and a digital mental health advocate, said that once she started to recognize how often she gravitated to her phone, she knew it had to stop. So the thenninth grade student did the unthinkable.
She deleted her social media apps.
‘TAKING OVER MY LIFE’
Eight months earlier, the 15-year-old track student was finishing a lap at Southern Alamance High School in Graham. But as she slowed and began to breathe, she couldn’t help but notice the worried faces of her teammates around her, eyes glued to their phone screens.
When Lee checked her email, she saw it — track season had been canceled. The cause: COVID-19.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this COVID thing is that serious?’” Lee said. “Before this, I thought it was something that would blow over.”
But it didn’t blow over. Lee’s high school, The Burlington School in Burlington, quickly transitioned to remote learning, and the friendly faces Lee had waved to by her locker mere weeks prior, she now only saw in small boxes via Google Meet.
Without school — without her friends, track practice, Thursday morning Fellowship of Christian Athletes meetings — Lee had little to turn to. Except her phone. But once she picked it up, she couldn’t seem to put it back down.
“I developed these very obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and it was interfering with my relationships, with my perception of myself, and with my goals and aspirations,” Lee said. “If there’s one good thing that came out of the pandemic, it’s that it gave me the self-awareness that I needed to understand my phone and social media was taking over my life.”
She needed to remove the temptation to check her phone. So, she settled on deleting her social media apps for one week,