Why I stopped sharing my life on social media
For me and my kids, new tech times are here and I'm adjusting
Tech is ever changing. And fast. There are things that ai can do now with voice, words and images that were not possible when I started curating my space here. I feel increasingly uneasy about putting photos online of my family. I’ve always had boundaries and rules, invisible to you, but important to me. But these days? They don’t seem enough.
I have a clear vision for the relationship I aspire to have with our children as adults, in fact as a lifelong dreamer who never stops, this is the one dream I’ve spent the most time on. The curiosity about how to make it come true and the doing the work it will take to get there is ongoing. I dream for our time in the future (as it is now) to be a two way street of no judgements, no jealousy, no disappointment, no regret, no unresolved anythings that might burrow away and get in the way of being able to create, play and love as grown-ups. As my kids grow-up and I enter a new chapter of parenting, I don’t want anything that I do online to threaten that dream. It means to too much to me to take the risk.
Once upon a time, Instagram was a playground to me. I felt free to be creative, I felt like I had a close relationship with my audience - that’s a hard thing to explain but it was crazy how many people I’d never met, seemed to understand my humour, references and were invested in my story. It was actually very beautiful. It was a fun exchange of life, a pocket full of pals. It was wholesome, truly. If you were there, I loved it. But that requires a lot of work to keep up. It’s a relationship and the best ones of those require you showing up, communicating and being present in eachother’s lives. You have to make a choice if you want to carry on doing that and it’s not something I want to carry on on that channel. I am now looking to be one of those friends you haven’t seen for a while and yet when you reconnect it’s like no time has passed. People say ‘creating content is so time consuming’ - hmmmm yes and no. If you’re doing it a lot, yes it really does. But I can also hop onto stories and have a little chat and it not take much time at all. But what goes on in the mind around it does takes more time; the second guessing that someone mistook you in the wrong way, the never ending wondering how you’re coming across, the frustration that you could have said it differently…and so on and so on. I’d like to say that I have a mind, or trained my mind not think like this, but I did not. There is so much information around which makes it seem like you can simply rewire your mind to address whatever problem you are having, perhaps you can, but I also think there’s value in embracing the reality of knowing your mind and working with it rather than trying to change it. I know now more than ever that I am a deep empath. When I was younger I was genuinely scared I was possessed or a psychic as I found it so easy to read every little bit of body language or understand people’s moods, reactions or feelings when they seemed invisible to others. I care deeply about what people think of me, not because I need everyone to like me, but because I feel a level of responsibility knowing people listen to me and consider me a trusted source.
These days, that freeroaming creative playground that IG used to be, feels more like treading on eggshells. I don’t know if that’s just me and my mind gaining more experience, or that the space has just changed. Probably a mix of both. Everytime I open the app, despite curating my feed as is wise to do, I never know what’s going to come for me. You don’t know what mood people have posted in or responded to you in and it I always end up taking in something seems to be shouting at me, shaming me or…boring me.
Perhaps I am also looking at the space with different eyes these days. I am very fulfilled in real life. In fact I’m obsessed with real life. In my desire to change me habits with my phone, I’m even trying to massively cut down on texting and send voice notes or just call people- radical! It’s amazing how much of a shift this has had.
When I got really into being an online creator, it was pandemic times. I was having huge life-changing shifts and I needed social media to help me plug some very real needs I had. I needed (and wanted) to build something else. I had just walked away from the business I’d built for 11 years and there was a big hole there I needed to fill. So I started building something new, that what creative entrepreneurs do. Social media is brilliant for that, it’s free and can be really fun in those early days of building a vision. I was also seeking connection. I had closed down a massive part of my life and simultaneously people had become inaccessible, the world had gone behind closed doors at a time when I needed a new network. And then there was my abundance of creativity; waves of it which flow every time I give birth. Yep, some people get PND, I get an unexplainable mountain of creativity, which if not exercised and released can go from light to dark quickly. Creativity is my life source and nothing sparks it more than literally brining new life into the world. It’s happened everytime I’ve had a baby and I wish I could bottle that I really do. During this particular creative wave, in lockdown days, social media became an ideal outlet to connect, start building and get creative.
One thing I’ve always been good at throughout my life is noticing and calling out when I’m on a stepping stone. I hop forward when ready where many others would stay there, trying to turn that stepping stone into a mountain and slipping and sliding to stay on it. Sometimes I’ll be on that stepping stone for an hour, sometimes months, sometimes a decade, but I know it when I see it. Sometime a go, I realised that building a profile on social media was a stepping stone, I’ll never close it down, it’s valuable asset, not just in commercial opportunities but also emotionally as it’s a valuable connection to a fantastic audience (hi you!) that I am lucky to have. But the days of regularly sharing my life, my family and ALL my creative energy I’ve hopped away from. I crave a level of privacy that I came close to giving away. I want to take what I’ve built and drive my creativity somewhere else and then circle back and feel the joy of sharing it with the people who helped me on my way to getting there. That is a dream to hold on to.
It is really strange to log parts of your day every day. No one can convince me otherwise because I’ve done it and I’ve done it when I wanted to and was happy to and when I felt like I had to and in both scenarios when I did it too much it felt really odd. I reached a point where logging a part of my everyday was normal and that became a concern to me. Can I swim in the sea without filming it? Does it still count? Can I put a cool look together without the need to share it? It’s not so much the sharing part that’s the issue, sometimes it’s really fun and I want to, it’s NOT being able to share that is the problem. I noticed that the simple act of taking a photo had forever shared - is it for keepsake or for online both me and my subjects would wonder even if not out loud. Because the intent is very different. I hated that feeling. Hated it. It was one of the things that made me start to consider if I was on stepping stone and needed to hop on.
A few weeks a go I began a screen writing course. Just for fun. My eyes have been opened to how small I have been playing with my creativity. Despite finding writing enjoyable, effortless at times even, and having a lot of expertise and knowledge in some audiences, even literally writing the strategic reports on what’s missing and needed for certain age groups, I’ve never seen myself as being able to create to meet that. I’ve always worked as an observer, commentator and advisor. My role has been this - here’s what’s happening, this is what we know, this is what we think it means and this what you could do next. I’ve never taken it upon myself, or believed I could, to take my creativity and ram into the gaps I’ve been such an expert in identifying.
I like to think I hold no restrictions to what I think I am able to do, but I realise that there are boundaries around me that I didn’t even know were there. It’s only by entering into play and dreaming that their ugliness has become visible. Now I see them, I can start to think about dismantling them. But this requires a shift in focus. One that I won’t have access to if I carry on sharing every moment of my life online. That is an attention thief which I can feel as I spend less time there, my mind is entering a new level of peace and my privacy and everyday idle thoughts are being reclaimed and repurposed. The world is not instagram. The world is not the internet. There are opportunities there, yes, but there is so much more outside of there too. I want to explore those places now.
Alongside these thoughts, I have also been thinking about our kids and their use of social media; I know my behaviour affects theirs. One of the reasons I wanted to experience being a creator online and have a go at building a following, was so I could get an insight into what that felt like. They’ve been raised in a creative home, as individuals with high self-expression needs (and permission), chances are they’ll want to go there at some point and building a personal brand will likely be part of their career journey. So I wanted an inside scoop on the emotional experience. And what have I learned to pass on some wisdom to them? It’s all about real life first. I love the opportunities digital offers, but I believe in real life so much more. I believe those of us that will thrive in the future are the ones who have this deep love of real life too and who can effortlessly move between digital and reality but always know that real is the one that matters most and the one most worthwhile of our love and attention.
Sometimes I get chatting to parents about teens and screens, and they ask for my advice or experience, I say the same thing:
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