I quit social media for nearly 3 years and this is what happened

life without the mirror

Part 1: A journal entry I made 3 years ago (circa 2021)

It starts now, my new beginning. I am going to remember what it’s like to feel complete in the absence of my own reflection. I’ve forgotten — since social media became a way of life, since my phone, with its announcements and news feeds and reassuring dings and vibrations, began to mark the rhythm of my day. Since my work, mostly online, asked of me that I constantly remind others of my existence (my worth, my work, my availability to engage).

I hate that I have to constantly attend to my online identity as if it were an underfed, like an attention-starved celebrity, lest it die from lack of nourishment. My identity has kept me chained to that person. After a decade of creating a ‘public me,’ I’m ready to move on.

That’s it. I’m over it. I’m done.

I’m going to experience what it’s like to wake up and not check anything other than my inner life. I’m going to stop promoting myself and let clients find me. No more hustle. I cannot continue to churn out emails and write posts. I cannot continue to think in post-sized paragraphs. Pithy quotes. Personal stories condensed to accommodate the desired emotional truth, in order to generate ….

likes, follows, comments, inquiries, clients, sales.

I am done generating. I want to sink back into the earth and become compost, like Ursula le Guin wrote, to allow all of my experience to de-generate in order to feed creativity.

It’s nobody’s fault but my own. It’s just the way of the world. Of being an online solopreneur. But I’m done. I’m going to find out what else there is to me. Parts left unlived. Words left unspoken.

Let it begin.

Part 2: Reflections on the identity crisis of part 1

After I wrote that, I took about three years off social media (with the odd post for family members).

I chose to be quiet online in a quest to heal my emotional/existential crisis, to deepen into spiritual self-inquiry, and explore my creativity — but I didn’t start with any of that. I needed to detox, first.

For context, I was winding down my work as a course creator, not abandoning it, but ceasing the promotion of my online programs. It was during lockdown anyway. I couldn’t see clients face to face, so no more bodywork. My 1-1 zoom sessions were building. It was the perfect opportunity to stop hustling, and by that I mean constantly being ‘online’ making my presence (expertise) known through social media posts and emails.

My promotion was far from disingenuous, and it did reflect at least a part of who I truly am. Still, it took a toll, crafting a presence and image online, a partial version of myself created to generate a business. Because it was so partial, it was also to some degree false. It just didn’t or couldn’t reflect the full picture. Gaylon Ferguson writes about this:

Psychologists call this a “false-self system,” and note that we may focus so intently on how we are appearing to others that we momentarily lose track of our own sense of being….One of the painful ironies of living a life of deceptions based on a false-self system is that, even if we succeed by faking it, all the desired rewards …seem to be delivered at the doorstep of the false self.

Natural Bravery: Fear and Fearlessness as a Direct Path of Awakening.

In grooming my partial self, I was neglecting other parts of me that cried out for attention, yet I had no idea what those parts were, or who I was even, without the reflection, what Ferguson refers to as a “prisonhouse of mirrors.”

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

It was far from easy to just stop posting, as that partial self felt starved of oxygen, and I recognized a deep terror —that in its absence I literally might not exist.

There was also the existential crisis of perimenopause

Nothing in my experience really prepared me for it, particularly the emotional and existential journey, which I wrote about at length in my post What’s the deal with existential fear?

As I aged beyond reproductive hormones, as happy estrogen no longer gifted me with its ovulatory fog of high spirits and the drive towards being productive (in every sense), I questioned my very identity. As estrogen waned, all I could see was unfinished business and unhealed wounds. It rewired me for less action and more tortured self-reflection.

If I could sum up the metaphysical meaning of what became endless waves of panic attacks and hot flashes, I would say that my body demanded that I answer one question:

“What do you need to let go of? And who are you really, when you let go of it?”

Before I could really respond to that inner question, I had to get used to what it felt like to be me when all that I am is reserved for my relationship with myself and my family. When all the ideas in my head, sometimes expressed in writing, remained in a creative evolution outside the public eye.

When I wasn’t posting on social media every day.

Initially, it was difficult to retreat publicly, because I felt guilty. First of all, I’d been trained by solopreneurship to share, share, share—so that people know who I am and can learn how I might support them. Fair enough, right? Until it took a toll.

Second, because my line of work has been healing, I had become used to offering support to those in emotional pain all the time, with every online comment. It wasn’t like in live, 1-1 Zoom sessions, where there is eye contact, a felt presence, genuine mutuality. Online, using my words to respond to others’ words, without an individual’s vulnerable, intimate, and private presence, I just didn’t seem to have the compulsion or the words anymore, despite feeling genuine compassion and the desire to serve. I had started to feel that I was in a make-believe world, no matter how much people said that they appreciated what I shared.

So I stopped posting. I stopped checking. I took all social media apps off of my phone and restricted myself to checking in on Sundays for one hour. I quickly came to appreciate just how addictive that one check-in could be, and also (because contrast is such a great teacher) how much I craved the mental space of not craving the endless scroll. It was challenging at first, because it was a habit. I had to create new habits: how to start my day, what to do when I felt bored, activities to give me a sense of being me, without the constant reflection. I ramped up meditation. I started meeting friends in the real world for walks and coffee, breathing in the ocean and becoming more present to the world in technicolour. I planted basil and tomatoes and radishes at the top of my garden. I sat outside with my morning coffee and talked to the giant gum trees that towered over my house. I took my dog for more and more walks—a blessing for us both, since those were his last months of life. But I didn’t know that yet.

After the fog lifted and I came back to myself, I settled into a new way of being. I really was that proverbial stranger in a strange land. It was nothing short of miraculous to go weeks and even months without sharing a single thought online.

Gradually I found myself at peace in an utterly new landscape, one where I felt rich with meaning and relevance anyway, without any reflection.

Part 3: returning to self, six months in

After six months or so of my social media detox, I noticed that as much as I was moving away from something, I was also gradually moving towards something else.

So often I have asked myself, feeling into that sense of ‘gut instinct’ or ‘divine guidance’ — is repulsion pushing me away from something so that I find my next best step, or is attraction pulling me towards it? Or do repulsion and attraction always dance together?

Nostalgia was a clue:

I missed the long and delicious journey of complexity that came with writing something large and significant, rather than small posts, articles, or short videos. I did a PhD in my 20s, during which time I also wrote my first novel. (An agent tried and failed to sell it at the time, after which it lived in a drawer; ditto for novels #2 and #3, despite the odd editor championing me, the literary agents supporting me ~ 20 years of this almost-published rigamarole has only deepened my sense that humility really is one of my very best teachers).

In my doctoral thesis days, I lived so fully in my head. There was no social media. I did not have children yet. I took the time, so much time, to explore webs of connections between things and I produced large pieces of work that gave me fuller and deeper satisfaction than any content I’ve produced since. Gosh, how I missed days and hours spent crafting 10,000–80,000 words, rather than coming up with a sentence or paragraph that is created and then consumed and forgotten in mere seconds.

I didn’t know how, or what, or in which format, but I knew that I was ready to return to the long game, to richness and complexity.

My realization that I could explore this new endeavour took its time to arise in consciousness, as I was so used to the hustle. Then one day, for no apparent reason, it was as if I had put on the exact-perfect prescription reading glasses after having convinced myself that blurry letters were the norm (true story).

Ah, so the time is now?

My parenting responsibilities had changed as my children took flight in the world. I had a partner to share life and responsibilities with, thus more financial stability. I had time again, which is a blessed ally to that internal pressure to discover myself, or redefine myself. Even my children catalyzed me. One moved overseas to study neuroscience at university and another, in acting school, moved out to live with her besties. My childrens’ pursuit of their passions and their creation of adult identities threw my own quest into sharp relief.

I fantasized about starting again, about going back to uni, about being that individual that I had been (who even was she though?) before motherhood and divorce and financial struggle — when I was ‘free’ and had time.

Having adult children is a crisis in a way — their energy of self-creation and ambition is either a wake up call or an opportunity to accept, deeply, one’s age and stage in a context of dreams achieved or dreams deferred.

My dreams, I saw clearly, were mostly deferred, or had been buried.

I understood through a new lens why I had had to leave social media. I couldn’t be the person writing a large piece of work and indulge in that complexity and ALSO be the person creating pithy content daily. I needed to become this new self first, the one who had morning coffee with gum trees, who rescued the garden bed from bandicoots, who knew with more inner clarity than ever what that quiet inner voice had to say.

All along, life had been using both repulsion and attraction to move me along in a better direction.

Life does just move us along any which way as soon as resistance is dropped and all feelings are allowed. There is often no conscious choice about it. My ‘choice’ was birthing in and through me all along. It was the niggle that led me to reassess my relationship to social media. It was the subterranean longing for creative expression whose existence only rose to awareness once I removed the boulder that had been weighing it down all those years.

I could name that boulder ‘social media,’ but if I’m honest, I can see that it was my ‘partial self’, my distraction, my addictions and my inauthenticity, ALL of which drove me to my social media habits in the first place.

So, six months into no-social media, I decided to dive into my mind and thoughts and experiences and allow myself to become someotherself. If clients were to seek me out, then fine, I was there for those who found me. And if not, I would be in my own internal process, discovering what clay awaited form.

Part 4: what became of me in those years off

I wrote a novel (again). My fourth. Not one my literary agent expected or loved after my ten year break, so we had to part ways.

I navigated existential crisis and deepened into several versions of awakening (equal parts amazing and super painful).

My beloved dog Maxi died (of old age). I miss him often. This photo below makes my heart ache.

We got a ninja kitten called Mila who is legitimately a ninja (you can’t see her coming in the dark and she attacks for pleasure).

I grew my hair out. I got better at surfing then I got worse at surfing. My little-girl stepdaughters turned into lovely teens and almost-teens, and my remaining at-home baby (my youngest of my own 3) turned into a surly 16 yo gym junkie/masterchef.

Their older brother and sister continue their journey of adulting with frequent calls for maternal support (today: “if I froze the chicken at its expiry date, is it still okay 2 weeks later?”) The adulting continues…

My clients kept on booking and keep on booking. Social media has made 0 difference in that equation. Life has a way of bringing you what you need, when you need it.

beloved Maxi

Mila as a kitten. Still my baby.

A month ago, I found Substack, and here I am. I have been using social media again to post links to my articles on here, and (mostly) resist all other uses.

*Except to follow about 30 cats whom I love as if they were my own. Truth.

Finally, I am willing to be online again.

I have even been dipping my toe back into online creation, but on my terms now. I have created my Soul Lines creative self-inquiry (my paid tier of Substack) as part of my mission to make healing and awakening accessible to all (more on that later), but to do so in a way that honours my inner creative (now that I’ve freed her at last) and yours (so that healing is playful, for once).

And, if you’re new to my Substack, thank you so much for reading. Knowing I can write whatever I want and even one person (you?) is reading it makes it all worth it!

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