Update ⭐ April 12, 2023
After almost a year-long “break”, I feel like I have been able to take the time to reflect on my social media presence and usage, and figure out how best to handle this “dangerous tool”. My views still very much align with what I wrote below, however I recently modified my profile to serve as a ”landing page” for my work—in other words, utilize it as an outlet to feed into my blog and podcast without worrying about follower counts, likes, metrics, and all the other toxic traits that drove me away from the platform to begin with. And with new friends made during my recent years in Italy, I suppose it’s a way to “keep in touch” 🙄😅. I still hate Instagram and social media altogether, but I am now more open to exploiting the system for my own benefit, without falling into its traps. I also tend to do drastic things during major life transitions, and moving back to the US might have been a trigger! 😅.
May 5, 2022 5:02pm
I’m no stranger to the digital world. When I was a teenager, I learned about the basics of HTML, Dreamweaver, and Paint Shop Pro (a cheaper version of PhotoShop) to create my own webpages.
I used to frequent Yahoo Messenger, actual social sites like Xanga, and a number of 2000s-era forums. I ran food blogs and developed a community in the early 2010s, thanks to blogging.
But now, I can’t handle the monster the digital world has become. As I was trying to carve a place for myself as @secondgendesi on Instagram, I was exposed to a world of competition, greed, and lust. There are too many people trying to win a “game” that’s impossible to win, unless you play by arbitrary rules that require all risk and rarely a reward.
I’ve learned that what I want to create and share, just cannot be appreciated in this type of environment, and I’ve realized that maybe it’s best to cut ties, and excuse myself from the table.
Instagram has negatively impacted my mental health. Perhaps it’s my type-A personality, my history of mental health struggles, and competitive drive, but this platform was distracting me from truly creating things I loved.
When I first launched @secondgendesi in June 2020, my Instagram page was a collection of posts with captions comprised of short-form stories. These were my “weekly” exercises, designed as a tool to express myself through creative writing, and as a channel to this blog.
I don’t have screenshots of @secondgendesi Version 1, but it was an aesthetic feed, featuring two short-form captions a week, followed by a post promoting a blog post.
In October 2021, I decided to shift my strategy. After realizing Instagram was pushing video content and a significant drop in the engagement I was used to, I was starting to become discouraged. I stopped my short-form creative writing, and tried to keep a presence because I wasn’t sure about quitting cold turkey.
My feed became random and jumbled. People I used to interact with regularly “weren’t seeing my posts”. My story views were dropping.
I know it sounds silly, but all of this was getting to me. I was feeling invalidated. Undesired. Not interesting.
Some people can ignore the competitive aspects of the platform, and use it as a source of entertainment. But if my desire is to create, I simply cannot enjoy it as a passive consumer.
I found myself getting angry when other content creators lightly boasted about how much their posts were saved, shared, and commented on, how their story views reached the 1000s, how it was easy for them to keep posting content and receive timely validation…especially when I wasn’t receiving it myself.
Feeling constant anger over something so trivial is not healthy, and while I tried different strategies to cope, nothing seemed to consistently work.
So I decided, for my mental health, I could do without social media. Perhaps it would be best, just to quit.
It is a scary thought to leap off that grid, especially when it seems like everyone cautions against having no social media presence in this day and age, but if it means getting your happiness back? Your sanity back? I think it’s a solid investment.
I also realize that, if Instagram was not helping me bring the viewership I desired to this blog to begin with, what was I doing wasting my time on there? From a “time is money” standpoint, I’ve been wasting way too many dollar bills…
This special note on mental health and social media is to say, do what is best for you. Follow your gut instinct, and leave toxic environments as soon as you can (after personally leaving a toxic work environment after 1.5 years, I can say my gut is pretty fine-tuned…).
I still hope that one day, my writing, my stories, my projects, will lead to something great. That I do reach the audiences I want to reach, and that I do feel validated for what I desire to contribute to the world.
I just know I have to be happy and healthy, if I ever want to make it to that point ✨