For Kaur, this unwilling withdrawal from her friends went hand in hand with her meteoric rise to fame on social media. And as a consequence of swapping real friends for digital followers and pixelated hearts, she has found herself feeling understandably anxious on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter.

Kaur declines to follow anyone on Instagram, and refuses to read the deluge of comments that flood every image or message she posts.

“I haven’t read comments for over a year – I’m not strong enough to read them,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll see something that isn’t so nice, and my friends will be like, ‘you get thousands of nice comments but then this one negative thing just breaks you’.

“Instagram has been so kind to me but it got to a point when I was always on it, always aimlessly scrolling, and always feeling like I’m not going to bother, because there’s always someone out there doing it better than me.”

Why Instagram poet Rupi Kaur credits her success to female friendship