An update on this post can be found at the bottom!
The first book I ever published was about a girl who was forced to participate in her family’s reality TV show.
I basically wrote my personal nightmare.
Over the course of Something Real, Bonnie learns about the attention economy, behavior modification, and other horrors of our media-saturated world.
In one of Bonnie’s classes, she’s reading 1984. It hits pretty close to home, and she underlines this quote:
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”
I often talk about how our books are our best teachers, how we are often writing the book we need to read. In my case, I wrote the book I needed to read today back in 2012. It’s been almost a decade since I was working on Something Real, but I’ve come to understand on a whole new level what Bonnie was going through with those cameras in her face, invading every aspect of her life.
When I wrote Something Real, I was focused on shedding light on the monstrous practice of putting minors on so-called “reality TV,” letting cameras into their home, broadcasting their childhoods to the world at large before they are old enough to truly consent.
Years later, I’ve begun to realize we are all on some version of reality TV—and, like Bonnie, I want out.
For me, regaining more than just a few cubic centimeters inside my skull means leaving Instagram.
The short version of why I want to leave Instagram has, in large part, been said quite nicely for me by author and teacher Elizabeth Lesser in her wonderful book, The Seeker’s Guide:
“When we look deeply at the stresses we could choose to walk away from, we are forced to ask questions about our personal values and the values of our society...You can mediate as much as you like, but mediation alone will not bring peace of mind…” (120)
My husband, a Zen Buddhist, passed along a question that has served me well since he shared it:
Does it make waves in your mind?
“Waves” of anxiety, stress, uncertainty, low-level suffering—these are all invitations to revaluate how you’re showing up in the world. Simply acknowledging that something is making waves makes it very difficult to ignore that you’re battling a psychic undertow. This mindful Q+A with yourself is a catalyst for some kind of necessary change.
Instagram was making waves in my mind. I knew I had to either ride them, or head back to shore.
I remember how turbulent my inner waves were the afternoon I took this photograph in Fez, Morocco. The artist in me was dying to capture the beauty of this particular moment. But I also remember how, for most of this walk through the labyrinthine corridors of the ancient city, I kept trying to get the perfect shot, then video. I couldn’t wait to post it on Instagram. Meanwhile, an icky feeling was developing in my stomach. I was missing out on the fullness of the experience—the depth of scent, the visual banquet. I knew that. I worried that having my fancy iPhone out lacked sensitivity to the conditions many of the city’s inhabitants lived in. I felt shame—the mindfulness practitioner glued to her phone. Defensive: I’m on a trip! It’s okay to take photographs. I felt relieved when the camera was back in my pocket. Now I could live the moment, instead of trying to cling to it. I could float on the sea of experience, rather than try to stuff the sea into a small bottle.
My word for 2022 is Integrity—it became my word for 2021 about halfway through the year, and the seismic (and very good changes) living that word has brought into my life are such that, well, I’m just gonna keep chugging along on this integrity train. See what’s at the end of the line.
After reading Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity earlier this year, I’ve now noticed that the icky feeling in my stomach when I post, the anxiety over my wording, the fear I’m going to get cancelled, the shame of pimping out my life for my “brand,” the guilt of lost time and comparison and self-absorption…all of that meant I was out of my integrity.
Tl:dr
Before I go any further into this post, I want to say something for the tl:dr crowd:
I recognize that we now live in a world where the act of leaving social media is a privilege afforded to the few individuals who either don’t need to rely on it for their livelihood or have enough companionship and support in their offline life that these virtual spaces don’t feel like a lifeline to the world.
I also recognize that there are so many people on the planet who would love to have access to social media, but don’t because of a lack of resources or government censorship.
I’m only able to walk away from my favorite platform because I know what I’m not going to be missing, and I’ve made my peace with whatever I miss out on because I’m not on Instagram.
(The fact that I feel a pang of loss that I won’t get to see what so-and-so is wearing on her fabulous feed, or see my friend’s amazing travel photos, or entertain myself with the randomness of other’s lives is proof pudding for me that it’s time to get out.)
I acknowledge that social media has shown great benefit to certain people, especially those working for social justice, folks living with chronic pain who can find one another, connecting communities, and allowing for quicker dissemination of information.
Since this isn’t a blog post about social media per se, but rather why I, as an artist and mindfulness for writers teacher, feel the need to walk away from this particular platform (Instagram), I’ll leave it at that.
I’ve chosen to stay on Twitter, but only because I pretty much forget it exists until my husband reads me a funny tweet he saw.
Twitter never got its clutches in me the way Instagram has. I left Facebook some time ago because of how they handled the 2016 election and what a cesspool of hate that place is. Until I cease being a writer and teacher and coach, I need some place that I can share my work with others outside my website and my actual books.
Instagram, though….that’s been a hard one to resist. I’m a true millennial in that I love me some aesthetics. And I really do enjoy framing and sharing a photograph—for so long, I told myself I could “do” Instagram because it was creative.
I also appreciated my friends who were showing up on Instagram in ways that were inspiring and helpful - too many to count, but a few standouts are below:
Author and mindfulness teacher Adreanna Limbach’s gorgeous mindfulness haikus, Eff This! Meditation’s Liza Kindred, who holds space for chronic pain and selfies as a form of self-love and empowerment. Camille DeAngelis’s incredibly useful videos about the writing life and process.
There are folks who are using Instagram to dismantle ageism and trans-phobia, or are using it as a space to challenge white supremacy (Rachel Cargle has a great and informative feed, to name just one). So many have chosen to use it to help save our planet, or, like NASA, give us a space to appreciate its beauty. I’ve learned so much from war correspondent Lynsey Addario’s feed, and am grateful to those who have been vulnerable enough to show up about struggles with eating disorders and other suffering in life. I know they have helped others feel less alone.
The choice to stay on Instagram is not one of moral bankruptcy, nor does it label you a “bad” creative or part of the problem.
But it is a problem for a lot of us and, if you’re in that camp: welcome.
Who knows how long I would have kept it up if the Facebook/Meta whistleblower hadn’t shared what we all probably knew anyway but never allowed ourselves to admit: Instagram is hurting young people. Badly. And knew it all along. As a young adult author, how could I be on a platform—and encourage my young readers to visit me there!—if it wasn’t a safe space?
But if that was my only reason, then I’d be desperately searching for an alternative platform, or working hard to get Instagram to change its algorithms and culture.
So let’s go a layer deeper, shall we?
Behavior Modification
As Bonnie from Something Real studies totalitarianism and dystopian societies through Orwell’s lens, she learns about the Heisenberg Principle, also known as the Uncertainty Principle, which notes that the presence of an observer changes the behavior of that which is observed.
So, if you have a camera on you all the time because you’re on a reality TV show, that camera is affecting how you behave, whether you believe so or not.
I realized this is exactly what was happening with me and the camera on my phone, with me and Instagram. With me and technology. With me and my creativity and my life. Things began to feel less valuable or real if I couldn’t capture them. Moments were stolen by my camera, never allowed to land on the branches of my mind because I was too busy trying to capture them.
A needling embarrassment would fill me each time I pulled out my camera by a river or during a joyful moment or a private moment and I’d do it anyway, like some kind of junkie trying to score just one more hit.
I can’t remember how many times I took this picture - maybe I got lucky and had it on the first go. I do remember feeling silly, a tourist trying to look cool in front of a crumbling wall. What would my Greek ancestors have thought of me in my American Ray Bans and iPhone? What did the Greek people on the street think? And did my “followers” feel shitty, because they were stuck in a cubicle and not in Greece? Or did it inspire them to go there? What was I trying to prove here? What did I want? One step further: why is it that I feel a dopamine hit right now, sharing a picture that I like of myself, still waving my cosmopolitan credentials? What is THAT about?
And yet…I don’t delete it here. Curiouser and curiouser…
I rationalized it, of course: I needed these to promote my writing, my coaching, to connect with my readers. I didn’t have the big budgets my publishers did (which they used for some books, but not mine). I couldn’t afford to hire a publicist or an assistant. I had to take what I could get.
But did I?
Being an artist has always been an act of defiance. Divergence of the highest order. So why was I suddenly, willingly, allowing myself to be led with the other lambs to mental and spiritual slaughter?
Getting My Mind Back
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”
This was how I’d begun to feel ever since I started getting paid for my words. The pressure to promote myself via social media that was put on me by myself, my dreams, my publishers, and those supposedly in the know in the writing community have stolen countless hours from this lifetime, increased my anxiety and depression, and levied a huge tax on my creativity.
A family member of mine in recovery had a sober friend who said he eliminates anything that fucks with his serenity.
I’ve been aiming to do the same, bird by freaking bird.
I started with the biggies: unhealthy relationships, then moved on to personal trauma work, and now here I am at social media.
It’s not surprising that the experience of someone in recovery would be applicable to getting off social media: more and more, psychologists are beginning to say that social media is as addictive as anything else that isn’t good for you.
My issue wasn’t so much with wanting to be on social—I’ve never really gotten bit by that bug. But I did want to have a successful career. And that was how social media roped me in: I was being told, over and over, that I needed to have a strong brand, strong social media presence, in order to share my work with the world.
So I dutifully did what every good Millennial does: I created my accounts, began curating them, began learning this new language of emojis and hashtags and filters.
It always felt gross. I don’t think I have ever posted something on Instagram that I felt good about, that wasn’t laced with some form of uncertainty, doubt, or reservation.
I ignored the feeling. I had to, didn’t I? This was the way the world worked now. Besides, what’s wrong with posting pictures of my cat?
Except, of course, when I would later see someone post about how their cat had died. Suddenly, my post seemed insensitive, cruel even. Should I delete it? My friends who were pregnant were having a much more painful dilemma—of course it was okay to share your joy. But what about all the women that were struggling to conceive? Was it okay that your belly photo was going to wound them?
There is no easy or right answer. Just the one you can live with.
The waves kept coming and coming.
As a stopgap measure, I relied on tools to help me manage my increased levels of stress and anxiety from being on social, particularly Instagram.
For years now I’ve been carving out those few cubic centimeters in my mind on the meditation cushion, cheered on by the unrelenting shoulder-tapping of Walt Whitman:
“Dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”
The tools of meditation and mindfulness weren’t just for Instagram, of course. They were for the ways my self-worth had gotten tangled up in my performance in every sector of my life. How corrosive professional jealousy and comparison could be. How infuriating it felt to be gaslit by publishers and every sting of disappointment when a book didn’t perform well and was absent from the shelves of every bookstore I walked into. And how fraught every single choice I made in my life was: if something wasn’t in danger of being made by an evil company, then it was hurting the environment or animals or workers or myself.
When the pandemic began, I felt terrible whenever I posted—people were dying and here’s me on my deck with a whisky and a smile? Sure, we were all just trying to show what life in quarantine was like but…insensitive much?
And another thing: when did we start sanctioning, nay, championing, abject narcissism? And was I guilty of that? Or was I hustling for my worth?
Waves.
Waves.
Waves.
(When I told my husband this post was getting long, he said, aptly: “Well, these are the last hours Instagram is going to steal from your life.” I laughed. And then I kept writing—because this post is me getting my words and my time and my life back.)
The more I sat on the cushion, the more clear it became to me how this whole strategy of using social media to promote myself - especially my mindfulness for writers offerings! - was unsustainable and not in line with my personal integrity (no judgement on those who have made other determinations - this is a personal choice). And, anyway, why was I listening to these so-called experts, who build their businesses on the broken dreams of others, pyramid schemes of a new, glossier kind.
Was there a way to have my cake and eat it too?
I began to consider how I might use social media for good. Became more discerning about what I posted. Thought more seriously about how it could land, who it could harm, what the point of it was. I thought about Rumi’s gates of speech: Was it true? Was it necessary? Was it kind?
I still didn’t feel good. No, I just felt worse.
Maybe if I wasn’t an artist, this would be less of a problem. It would still be a problem - social media is unhealthy for everyone. But it’s seriously harmful to artists, who need as much silence, time, space, and bandwidth to create as possible. They need time to fill the well, court flow, get inspired. So if they’re focusing all their time and energy on marketing and curating a brand and jealously scrolling through other’s feeds, how much energy do they have to create at all, let alone something meaningful that does right by the miracle?
How can you add to the conversation when you’re only filling yourself up with the noise of the global echo chambers?
How can you bring presence and attentiveness to your work when your brain is filled with GIFs and memes and how great your colleague’s dinnerware set is and maybe you should take a shot of the way the light is hitting your desk, then post about how you’re not writing?
Books like Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing and William Deresiewicz’s The Death of the Artist dig deep into these questions. I can’t recommend Odell’s enough - it truly is required reading for all artists. Death of the Artist is a bummer, but it will make you feel incredibly seen: you’re not crazy - this culture really is set up to make artists broke, miserable, and frazzled.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass offers ways out of this technological abyss we’ve all fallen into. Imagine this poet-scientist too busy with her camera, getting shots for Insta, instead of restoring her relationship to the land and learning the language of plants and her ancestors? This book would not have existed, had that been the case.
Any book on mindfulness that’s worth its salt will talk about the need for silence, slowing down, and paying attention. These are great resources, whether you have waves in your mind or not.
Every Writer I Know Hates Social Media
Every writer I work with or talk to hates social media—even the ones who are good at it. They see the way it has damaged our community, our relationships, our self-esteem. The pain of FOMO, comparison, jealousy. The loss of those quiet moments to wonder and experience and wander. They hate all the tabs open in their brains, the constant inflow of information, the compulsion to pick up their phone when they have a second to spare (a second which would have been much better served with some nice breath work, watching leaves play on the tree outside their window, or daydreaming a new scene for their book). They hate how it makes them feel numb and dumb and frazzled and hollowed out.
They readily admit it has increased their depression and anxiety and that it hurts their writing.
So why do they - we - keep doing it?
Lesser, again, expresses how I’ve been feeling when she talks about commiserating with friends over the stressers in her life:
“We gave each other support even as we colluded in maintaining a group trance of unworkable stress” (121).
This word, trance, is just right when it comes to Instagram. In fact, Buddhist teacher Tara Brach talks about the act of awakening as coming out of the trance most of us are in throughout our daily lives.
It can be so easy to justify the trance - from what I can tell, there is nothing inherently wrong with posting pictures of the beautiful meal you had at a restaurant. But there’s nothing inherently right about it, either.
What is the point? Are we that starved for creative outlets, connection, affirmation? Maybe so. Reams of articles and books have been written about why we do social media, and why we shouldn’t. But how many people out there are willing to dive into the waves it makes in their mind, and take the risk that what they might find under the surface will necessitate a major life change?
Riding the Waves in your Mind
One way to figure out your relationship to Instagram (and/or other social media platforms) is to do two things:
A full break from it for a week - see what comes up for you. There’s good data in there.
Hardcore self-examination. Below are a few journal prompts to work with, if that’s helpful to you.
What do you really have to show for your following?
How much of your life has it cost you?
How much of your dignity?
How much of your well-being?
How many people were damaged in the making of this platform?
How has it damaged you?
Do No Harm
I began to feel like I was going against my credo to do no harm: Doesn’t it hurt people who see my curated life of creativity and happy marriage and healthy kitty and abundance of whisky?
While it’s not wrong to be happy or to have things, it began to feel….gauche and perhaps insensitive. As the effect of Instagram’s algorithms have begun to come to light, I also started to feel a stronger, deeper concern for the teen readers of my books, who might be lured onto the site to see what the authors they read are posting. And in the meantime, receive all kinds of unhealthy messages.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that I’m a Buddhist and mindfulness teacher. I can think of few places less mindful, less present, less liberated than Instagram. How could I encourage the writers I work with to have healthy boundaries with technology, to begin to recognize the ways in which tech takes up all their bandwidth, leaving little room for flow to flourish if I was using those platforms myself?
There Are No Necessary Evils
Ever since the pandemic began, I’ve begun to consider the possibility that by actively participating on Instagram’s platform, I might be out of my own integrity. This, I have to add here once again, doesn’t mean that everyone who participates is out of their integrity. I
I won’t lie: as a small business owner and an author, I was nervous about what losing this (so called) free advertisement would mean for me. I can’t afford ads or a publicist. I don’t have a physical building where I can hang out a shingle. Wasn’t this my only option for getting the word out about my work?
How could I help anyone with words if they didn’t know I existed?
I kept hearing people say the term “necessary evil,” as in Being on social is a necessary evil for authors.
There are no necessary evils. Evil is never necessary.
So if you hear yourself using that phrase, that’s a big old red flag from your Higher Self to have a nice, long look at that part of your life.
Again: Dismiss whatever insults your own soul.
Sure, there are things about all our jobs we don’t like, but have to do. But there are also things we don’t like and don’t need to do…and yet we do them, because people are telling us—with no data to back it up—that we should.
Social media is one of those things. Unless you are very good at it, have money and an assistant, plus the backing of major signal boosters, you are not likely to see a big return on your social media investment.
As I’ve dug into my own data and read about the experiences of other authors, such as my friend, NY Times bestselling author Sara Raasch, who posted about the dismal sales that resulted from what seemed like a hugely successful social media campaign on TikTok that took over her life and left her feeling wretched, I realized we were all being sold a bill of goods. She spoke openly on Instagram about how much time and energy she’d spent giving to the reading community, only to realize that the energetic exchange was highly unbalanced: the numbers showed that all those hours spent away from her writing, the huge time suck of a major social media presence…wasn’t worth a damn thing.
Not only does social media rarely move books, most authors find that— despite their committed social media presence—they don’t earn out and get dropped by their publishers or find it damn hard to sell another book due to low numbers that were always out of their control. So there goes our reason to do it for business.
A recent article in the Times confirms how “unreliable” social media followings are for book sales: even celebrities with huge followings can’t earn out their advances.
While the article acknowledges that a large online following might get you a book deal and possibly a big advance, contract signer beware: it may just be the last deal you ever make with a publisher.
I think about the authors who spend half their time creating marketing images and trying to look good in photos and get a shot of their laptop and latte (or beer or wine) just so (guilty, guilty, and guilty)…when they could be writing or dreaming or meditating or just enjoying their goddamn lives, filling their wells and getting inspired.
I’d gone to one of my favorite bars in Brooklyn on an artist date: wine and poetry. What did I feel the need to do? Break my flow and take this picture.
In The Seeker’s Guide, Lesser shares a truly horrifying fact for any female writer to set her eyes on:
women in their forties and fifties are experiencing memory loss at “unprecedented rates” because of the “increased amount of data they must process and store” (Lesser, 118).
I’ve not yet crossed into forty and yet…could that be why I have such a hard time finding the right words these days? I don’t take medication that has cognitive side effects and when I consider how fried my brain feels from over-processing information, I can’t help but see these findings present in my own life. And of course this is happening.
On a neurological level, we have dial-up brains that are trying to keep up in an Elon Musk world.
Creative Benefits of Hermits
“I’m not interested in being Icarus. I want to be Circe, who felt invisible, lived on her island, made friends with lions, and found her inner magic.
And turned bad men into pigs. ”
I miss privacy. I want privacy.
I don’t live in the woods, but I want to be a forest unto myself.
I want to bloom and decay in the silence. I want to be rooted inside something tangible, something…real.
I’m so tired of stumbling upon that feeling, only to lose it the moment I try to capture it with my phone, to compose a caption in my head.
Something Real
It was my husband who came up with the title for my debut novel. We were eating tacos, trying to figure just what it was I was trying to say with this book. What bothered me so much about these cameras in homes?
It wasn’t real.
We have such a disconnect with things that are real: our currency is digital, which makes it so much easier to consume and fall into debt. Our photographs are stored online, no longer in photo albums that invite us to flip through our memories on an afternoon. Half the books I’ve loved and read aren’t on my shelf to remind me of them because they’re on my e-reader—same goes for the movies, the music. Part of why my husband and I love vinyl is because it’s something we can hold in our hands, something we paid for, something that gives us a better sense of the artist themselves—their album art, the packaging.
Even the not-so-great stuff has a sense of unreality: rejection letters as an impersonal email as opposed to someone having to make the effort to put an actual piece of paper they signed into your self-addressed, stamped envelope. Break-ups via text.
All that to say….I want a real space to connect, to dream, to live, to be. I’m tired of the liking and the following or the unfollowing, all these stupid adult playground games.
For personal reasons, I don’t want people creeping on my life. Doors that I’ve energetically closed are meant to stay closed. I don’t like the idea that someone who is not part of my life is privy to intimate details of it: what my kitchen looks like, how my cat is doing, where I went on vacation. Boundaries are a good thing, and social media often has very porous ones.
I want more than a few cubic centimeters of my mind to myself — I want my life to myself. I want the moments to be lived and felt and carried within me, not half-experienced while I try to frame a shot.
One of the best lessons mindfulness has taught me is impermanence. It makes me appreciate what I have a lot more—and know when the emperor has no clothes a lot sooner.
In preparation for stepping away from Instagram, I chose to do it the long, mindful, arduous way. I didn’t download an app to mass delete everything in my account. (Downloading apps insults my own soul). Instead, I went through every single one of my hundreds of photos and archived them.
The past six years of my life flashed by me in little tiles of images over many hours. I relived it all, grateful for all the experiences, and sad for how often I missed out on the fullness of them because I wanted to get the image juuuuust right.
On the advice of a wise friend, I didn’t delete the account, for fear a creep would take my name and put out who-knows-what under it. And it’s a way people can discover where to find me, if they’re looking.
I’d been thrilled to capture and share this image I’d snagged in my Brooklyn neighborhood. But so often, when I posted things that I saw artistically, few people cared. They wanted the selfies, the personal moments, what my bowl of soup looked like. I found that really weird and disheartening (pun intended?).
Am I sad? A little.
It’s been really strange, not taking my camera out all the time. And working through wondering what the point of photos are if you can’t share them with the whole entire world. I don’t miss no longer having the nagging worry of forgetting to respond to comments or posts, or the disappointment of something I put out there being largely ignored. I won’t miss the FOMO, the comparison, my eyes wandering to that “likes” or “followers” number. I like not curating my life while I live it. I like that I don’t have to watch the charade of others in this play with too many acts and costume changes. All that set design, costing thousands of minutes. The endless curtain calls - book deal (applaud!), new shoes (applaud!), eating an ice cream cone in front of a famous landmark (applaud!).
Backstage is where the real fun happens. Everyone knows that.
It feels good to place my full attention on an experience, the people I’m with. To be fully present. To be available and open to inspiration. To not place the value of an experience in how well it will look in a 400 x 400 space.
It’s a kind of internal vertigo, a reorienting that feels both freeing and, sometimes, lonely.
I won’t beat myself up over all those wasted hours, the digital sweat equity. Bless and release.
Instead, I can be grateful to be waking up to what the platform has taken from me, from the writers I work with, my friends and family, all those kids who Silicon Valley whiz kids have hurt with messages of not-enoughness.
I can see how empty it is. And how empty it made me feel - even when there was kindness, generosity, laughter, or love on it.
It wasn’t real. Or, rather, not real enough. So it made me feel less real. Less solid. Less here.
A modern-day living ghost.
.
.
.
I’ve been surprised at how often I still reach for my phone when I have a few spare moments, only to remember that I my options are reading my email (pass) or reading the news (on a scale of 1-10, how depressed do I want to feel?).
Now, I simply look at the world. At something real.
And that is enough.
Update: April 29, 2022
I left Instagram in early December 2021. I was sad for about a day. Truly, I am so happy without it. I no longer am living my life through a filter, watching myself watch myself.
Is it any coincidence that I have fallen into a major flow state since no longer using my social media time suck of choice?
My life is more full of things and people than ever, and yet...there must be a link between being more creative when you’re not trying to simultaneously be a marketing maven. I admit to occasionally looking up someone. I read an article about them, and I dip into their Instagram to learn more. But these are quick peeks and then I’m out. I’m no longer scrolling and losing track of time, feeling FOMO and jealousy and like everyone’s house, hair cut, dinner, garden looks better than mine.
I’m connecting so much more with people one-on-one. I’m taking up new hobbies (embroidery), and cooking up a storm. I love watering my plants and I love not trying to get pictures of them so that I can post them. I water my plants and listen to the Beautiful Chorus mantra album and, if I’m home alone, I sing along. Did I mention I’m writing so much more?
About a month or so later, I quit Spotify. And that led my husband to discovering the most incredible Internet radio station, Fip, which has been feeding my creativity with music I’ve never heard before as well as wonderfully eclectic favorites. We never would have found that without leaving Spotify, which we decided to no longer support due to how terribly it treats artists, and yeah, Joe Rogan is on there).
Here was an unexpected thing, though: in leaving Spotify, I stopped getting instant gratification. This forced me to be more curious, to go with the flow, to see how I could encounter whatever song was playing. You know, old school, like the radio. In no longer trying to control my experience or mood, some really cool stuff began happening: dots connecting, well filling, a general sense of expansiveness. It was also one less damn monthly fee, one less tab opened, one less thing to do (put a song on a playlist, share it on social, blah blah blah). It also has given me the gift of buying actual music and supporting artists directly. It feels good not to just have what you want at your fingertips. It’s so much more interesting.
This week, I left Twitter.
The reasons aren’t so different from leaving Instagram in terms of integrity, but with Elon Musk possibly buying it (more billionaires controlling more things) and how much conflict and hatred and anxiety it sows in the world, I began to wonder why the heck I was even on there. Tweet Delete made it easy to delete all my tweets, media, and likes so that I have a nice parking spot and little else.
You’ll notice that I didn’t delete either my Twitter or Instagram accounts. That’s because I don’t want anyone to impersonate me, but also because people looking to connect with me can find out how when they land on my pages.
It feels so good to step away from these spaces. I know many artists feel they don’t have a choice, but if you dig into the research, you might find the platform you’re on isn’t even that helpful to sharing your work. To be fair, I’m a traditionally published author and that affords me other avenues for connection - readers reach out to me and I guest teach or go on podcasts, which give me a good reach. I also do other forms of outreach that feel good to me, such as sharing meditations on Insight Timer. I love my newsletter, and I think there’s a lot of word-of-mouth with that, too.
But, honestly, even if it gave me less access to readers and writers I want to connect with, I’d have to make these choices for my writing and mental health to flourish.
I recommend really taking an honest look at your social media: is it really giving you what you want, whether it be results or meaningful connection (on a regular basis). Or are you hoping for a “someday” boost that will likely never come because look how big a pond we little fishes are swimming in!
The choice to simplify as much as possible is opening my whole life up to me. It’s glorious. I hope you get a taste of that, too, in whatever way feels good to you.
Now, to figure out a better relationship to email….
