Eighteen Years Later, A Goodbye

vol. 2 | going gently

Day is Done, Goodnight! by Carl Larsson, 1908

In the spring of 2005, as a college sophomore at Georgia Southern University, I got a strange email request from my friend, Sara.

“You’ve been invited to join The Facebook.”

I remember thinking, “This sounds dumb,” even as I clicked on the link and signed up for it. (A choice I have repeated a number of times since.) This weird, new site was basic, like a yearbook page. Each user had nothing more than a single photo, a one-page profile, and a little blue box where friends could type messages to them. It was kind of boring, but the intrigue was high since it gave us access to people on campus we had only known in passing, and that intrigue only grew as students all around me began to talk more and more about it over the next coming months.

Then, in the summer of 2005, I broke up with my long-term boyfriend. Suddenly, The Facebook (yes, there was a “The” back then) offered something of great value: a way to silently check in on someone I had lost to gauge how happy, or unhappy, he was without me.

It only made the hurt worse.

We all know what came after the spring of 2005: the slow, then rapid, descent of the entire human population into the strangely intimate, yet also detached, world of social media. And I don’t need to go into the details of what so many others—scientists, parents, teachers, anthropologists, counselors—have told us about how such a descent is affecting our health. We’re aware. We experience it every day.

Obviously, social media has brought about many beautiful things: connections with other artists, teachers, and creators; fun recipes, projects, and crafts; accessibility for vulnerable populations; activism, social justice, and real-life change. Just as we could list all the ways social media has harmed our lives, we could also list the joy it has brought us. It’s nuanced. I’ve walked away before, and I’ve also enjoyed creating and posting, so I’m not here to wholly decry it.

I’m just here to tell you why I’ve decided to finally—fully—move on, nearly twenty years after that Facebook invite hit my inbox.

I already work from home, on an iPad or computer, and my children see that because they are home with me. I’m on devices a lot because I use them to write, and I try to be explicit about what I’m doing when Lucy and Theo are present. It’s important that they know I’m working and not ignoring them for the sake of likes and follows. (Something I’ve been guilty of many, many a time.) But balancing my work with the siren call of social media has become impossible, and the struggle to actually offer my children what they need—their mother, present and engaged—is a losing game.

More than this particular struggle, even, is the struggle to enjoy my actual, flesh-and-blood life. I feel like I am constantly living in some made-up virtual universe which has an iron grip on my opinions, creativity, relationships, energy, and work. I can’t savor a damn thing without also wanting to take a picture and post it. I can’t read a book without feeling the need to share it. I can’t see a person’s unfollow or sudden lack of interest in my page as anything less than hatred. I can’t write a word without considering how to build my platform.

Instagram has its long, meta-tentacles wrapped around everything I think and do, just as it was designed to. So I’m quitting.

(Lol, I say that so easily, as if I haven’t waffled about the decision for months or quit once already for an entire year.)

In my February newsletter, I shared this post from Nish Weiseth about her own decision to finally quit social media. (She has a whole series going on the topic.) There are a lot of similarities in our stories, and I think that’s true of many of us. We all want to be at least a bit more free from our phones. We all want to be more physically connected to our neighbors and communities. We all want to model better technology boundaries for our kids. It’s hard to do these things, and I’m not any better than you just because I’m quitting and you aren’t. I won’t pretend to know your reasons for using social media and you don’t have to justify them. Like Nish, I’m just sharing an important decision I’ve made with readers who have chosen to offer some of their time to me. Maybe you are in the same boat I am, maybe not. But if you are? I encourage you to think through what’s holding you back from letting go and why.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but even more upsetting than the impact on my mental health and family has been the fear that I will never become a successful author without social media. This is how Instagram has kept me coming back, again and again.

At some point, I have to accept that this fear might come true. And that it’s still worth leaving.

(Did I just come to that conclusion as I was writing it? Yes, I did.)

I’ve been moving in this direction for a long time. I quit the absolute dumpster fire that is Facebook a few years ago and Twitter not long after that. (I actually deleted my entire Facebook account, but Twitter remains. I simply haven’t logged on in years.) Instagram is the one app I truly enjoy, so it’s the one I have struggled with most. I left in early 2021 and then came back last spring, thinking I had finally figured out how to use it wisely. Joke’s on me.

Right now, my account is deactivated and I won’t have the app downloaded again until I’ve had a significant season away from it. I need that in order to build healthier habits for myself without the temptation to just log back on. After a few months, I’ll say a(nother) goodbye and let my profile serve as a way for people to find me here. I’d love to figure out a way to mass-archive all my posts or mass-save them to my device, so if anyone knows how to do that (can we do that?) help a sister out. Eventually, it might just need to go the way of Facebook.

I’ve given eighteen whole-ass years of my life and energy to social media. That’s a lot of life. It’s a lot of energy. Going gently with myself here means not only severing the connection I have with that online space but also with the unrealistic expectations that come from being on it. I’m saying yes to more than just time and energy. I’m saying yes to my body looking like it actually does. I’m saying yes to more quiet in my mind and spirit. I’m saying yes to long-form writing and slowed-down processing. I’m saying yes to keeping some thoughts to myself. I’m saying yes to a career that might not be what I hoped. I’m saying yes to my kids and my husband.

I’m saying yes to God.

Maybe it’s silly to think so deeply about something like quitting social media. But I don’t think so. We like to pretend it’s just this minor thing that holds no importance, but it does. It affects us, body and spirit, and that impact makes it a very serious thing, indeed.

For more than two years, anytime I considered what it would be like to finally, fully quit Instagram, my body would soften in anticipatory release. I would hear the voice of the Holy Spirit as a gentle, maternal nudge in my gut: “Yes. That.” My soul was begging me to let it go.

After a decade of battling with my body—and mind—I have to consider what role social media has played in those battles, especially since I began using Instagram the same year my mental health struggles began in earnest. How much has my ability to connect to my own self, to Jesus Christ within me, been hindered by endless scrolling that turned into impulse buys, critical examinations in the mirror, and obsessive self-improvement? How many of my anxiety attacks and compulsive behaviors have been a direct result of the choice to keep staying for just one more week…month…year?

How much have I actually harmed myself by perpetually trying to better myself?

I’m not asking these questions in a condemning way, but an exploratory one. I think they’re worth due consideration for all of us because, one day, Instagram won’t be here anymore. I don’t want to have built my whole life on that sinking sand.

Consider this from a November article in The Atlantic:

“It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media…

To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often—and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well. We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.”

The most loving thing I can do for myself is to say goodbye. And it’s hard. It’s hard because there are beautiful creators I love to follow, people who inspire and teach me, and I don’t want to miss out on what they’re posting. It’s hard because I see other authors gaining huge audiences and it’s so tempting to think maybe this will be the post that goes viral, or that will be the reel that gets massive traction. It’s hard because Instagram really is addictive and I crave the dopamine boost even as I hate how it makes me feel so less than.

To go gently with myself, I have a plan for how to thoughtfully replace what Instagram gives me:

1. For the creators I admire, I’m subscribing to their newsletters and rolling them up (using Unroll Me, a fantastic email tool) in a single daily email to read at my leisure. I’m also subscribing, if available, to their Substacks.

2. For anyone I’ve connected with personally and wish to remain in contact with, we’ve exchanged phone numbers like the olden days.

3. For my own writing, I’m going to put my focus on the projects that matter most to me. I created this newsletter a few months ago in anticipation of quitting social media. I’m also going to get back to working on my novel now that I’ve had some agent feedback on it with ideas for how to improve.

4. For the dopamine boost, I’m going to start walking outside in the mornings. I’m also going to download the Fender app and re-learn guitar, a skill I just barely had to begin with and have wanted to continue growing since 2006.

I want my time and energy and mental space back. I want the freedom of a moment unattached to the compulsive need to share or compare. I want to write for the gosh darn joy of it. I want to look at my face in the mirror and not bemoan how much older it looks without a filter. I want to get comfortable with boredom and silence again.

As I already mentioned, starting The Nook was an intentional effort on my part to fill up the space leaving social media would soon open up. It’s like the good ol’ days of blogging, when people catalogued their thoughts because they had something to say, however uninteresting, simply because they wanted to and not because an algorithm had convinced them they should. And what I’ve noticed about Substack, which I love, is that most people here are genuinely talented writers who are deeply invested in their readers. We are still online, but in an intentional, meaningful way. The work I produce here takes much more time and is all the more satisfying because of it.

As a paid subscriber, you are helping me create in a way that serves, and that means so much to me. Thank you.

Here’s to eighteen years (and more) of that.

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What about you, friend? What does social media feel like for you these days? I’d love to hear your thoughts!