The Strangest Thing About Stepping Back (from Social Media)

For the past year or so, I’ve been taking conscious, extended breaks from Instagram. I typed ‘social media’ originally, but it’s pretty much only Instagram that I denigrate here. Its addictive nature and tendency to help you hyper-focus on the highlights reel of others’ lives is conducive to poor mental health, my constant comparison-itis, and an ironic inability to show up online properly as who I am.

‘Of course that’s the case’, I hear you cry.

Yet it doesn’t make it okay, either.

I’m on a constant quest to help myself become the best version of me, and I’d realised that Instagram had become a huge time-suck, as well as a place where I didn’t achieve much. Numbers aside, what did I have to show for scrolling and scrolling? Achy eyes? A bad back from how shrimp-like my posture had become? Reduced time to actually pursue and enjoy my hobbies? Sometimes, it even impacted my ability and motivation to get up and complete household chores or run errands. I might not have TikTok (something I’m indelibly smug about for no reason!), but Instagram was and is my abyss.

The strangest thing about stepping back from social media is how you quickly find out that nobody cares, in the very best way. I mean, it’s obvious really: when you stop putting yourself out there, people stop perceiving you. There are no new posts for them to ‘Like’ or not ‘Like’ and, instantly, there goes the worry of not getting ‘enough Likes’ – whatever that means.

Before, I noticed that my chest would feel hot and tight in the same way that adolescent me worried about going to the bathroom of a restaurant on my own, or that everyone would be staring at me if I did something as simple as pop for a grocery shop. If a stranger cast their eyes in my vicinity – likely only to look for whichever friend they were also meeting at the Big Topshop in Oxford Circus – I’d automatically assume they were criticising my face, my clothes. When the teacher enquired after something, anything, I’d immediately blush from my head to my toes, believing they were only critiquing and calling on me. This teenaged tendency to make it all about yourself only extends when you let it. And Instagram became my adulthood playground in all the worst ways.

Since stepping back from Instagram here and there, I’ve also noticed a shift in the writing that I do share online. Now that I’m no longer commodifying my life to build a personal brand, I’m even more genuine in my essays. There’s no fear of saying something too honest and risking a brand partnership. I share a little deeper, instead of rigorously editing myself to appease the masses – now, I’m even more focused on expanding our focused and intentional community, built on storytelling and human connection and expression. I am so glad to have returned to these slow-burn platforms and ways of connecting, because I have always been a slow-burn sort of person.

All this to say, I’m delighted to be back in my writerly, readerly era in the way I always loved, and Instagram is really not that deep.