Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Re-examining my relationship with social media

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed, I’ve been quieter than usual on there recently. Granted, a few weeks ago, I moved to Toronto and started a new job - a lot of newness has been thrust on me all at once. It’s been intense and overwhelming, all-encompassing and a huge shock to the system, in wonderful ways. So, yes, part of the reason for the quietness has been just sheer lack of time to even look at my phone and engage in the ways I’ve been used to.

Though if I’m honest, I’ve been re-examining my relationship with social media. I started my blog back in 2007. Over the years, I’ve shared a great deal of myself online and perhaps there’s just part of me right now that’s craving keeping more things private.

The social landscape has changed

Back when I started out on social media, it was fun and more personal. Between 2011 and 2019, my blog bloomed and led to one helluva a career - I’ve was flown all over the place, I was on press lists and invited to all sorts of fancy things, hell - it even led to me becoming a Fitness Editor at ELLE Magazine and landing a book deal.

But now social media is a business. The fun seems to have been stripped out of it and it’s all metrics; how many followers, likes and shares do you have? If those aren’t high enough, are you even worth engaging with? And that’s if your content even gets seen in the algorithm age. I’ve spent time, energy and effort putting together content - trying to keep up with the demands of what it takes to remain visible/relevant in this social media era - only for it to be seen by barely a fraction of my audience.

Where perhaps I was once aiming for a huge following and a voice as an ‘influencer’ - I find I now just don’t have the desire, will or skill level to truly put any skin in that game.

The Moral Dilemma

I’m also finding it hard to engage with social media recently because *gestures at everything* JESUS CHRIST. Everything is just awful. To scroll on Instagram, in the space of a minute I’ll see fitness content, a make up tutorial, something about women’s rights being stripped away somewhere, horrendous footage of the genocide in Palestine, back to someone’s comedy skit about The Kardashians. Our brains were not wired for this.

I’m a grown ass woman who has been struggling with my mental health recently and I am feeling the effects of the sheer amount of information I’m exposed to through my social feeds - Lord only knows how young people are expected to navigate this.

The guilt

Over the past couple of months, my life has gone from an incredible low, to a complete 180 degree turn where I now find myself on a long-awaited upward trajectory that I hoped and prayed for for a long time.

I am happy, sure, but I also find myself thinking of the people in Palestine and what they are enduring on a daily basis. I struggle with celebrating things about my own life right now in the wake of such suffering. The helplessness I feel, and the guilt at the privilege of simply being able to put my phone down and not look at it, if I so choose - I just… frankly, I feel sick most of the time. Yes, we must live our lives, but it is hard to think about anything else right now.

And of course, in this internet age, if you don’t talk about it publicly, you’re an asshole, if you do, it’s performative. If your activism isn’t online for the world to see, it doesn’t matter.

So…

I don’t think I want to quit Instagram altogether, but I definitely feel torn about being on there right now. I’m not sure what I want to share. Moving forward, it likely won’t be a curated feed of any kind, with any specific agenda.

I’m tired of feeling like I’m a product and have to market myself in some way. I get that spaces evolve, as do the way we interact with them, but I don’t want to just be there for the sake of being there. I want to be able to show up with intentionality, in a way that feels authentic and I’m not sure that any of it does for me, right now.

I would like to get back to more long form writing here, on Substack. Perhaps I’m craving the freedom of those early days of blogging. Here, I feel more space to breathe, be more thoughtful and expressive.

New chapters often involve a reckoning with our behaviours and I think this one is definitely presenting an opportunity for me to examine this one, so I’m excited for the opportunity to explore that.