I'm better off

the quarterly updates and a little ramble

Hello everyone, I am here to do a quarterly check-in and wanted to wrap up my series of my social media break reflections!

Thank you so much for being here and for your support of my ramblings.

---

If you are new here, a little over a year ago I decided to take a break from social media. I had taken short breaks here and there but realized I had never taken an extended period off probably since I got Facebook in 2006. Which turned my month break into an intentional time away. I wanted to share my personal experience with that time and although there are a lot of articles that go in depth more than I could, I will stop boring you all with my processing in this last post on it! To catch up on my series you can check it out in my posts!

For context, I downloaded Instagram a couple weeks ago to reach out to old friends to send a video for my husband’s 30th birthday. I made a story saying “hey I’m alive, do you guys want to participate in this?”. My naivety to getting back on the app after being away hit immediately as I saw hundreds of people saw the story, some of them being very close friends and only two people replied for hours. I was so confused. These are people who have not seen or heard from me in so long, and it felt like I was dead to them already. I felt angry, I felt ignored. I felt a lot of feelings that were all valid but definitely misguided. I spoke to my friend about it who is basically one of those daily posters and she said the very obvious point of fact that Instagram story views do not equal real life friends. I think I was forgetting about that social media expectation which is that people are passively viewing your life, to the extent you allow them to. A few here and there may interact with you about something they see, but the vast majority will not.

I could just sense that feeling of the carousel. It’s literal and metaphorical. I was just another story they were swiping past and I think it was jolting to be away from that for so long. I have intentionally put people in my life in my day to day that have deep meaning to me, so to see that passivity, intentional or not, just struck a chord I think. Which goes back to that internal validation that we get when people interact with us through a platform and that feeds our self-esteem.

My other takeaway is that I basically saw how I am better off after all. The time away made me realize that my algorithm is just memes. Now that I am back on the app I get to passively scroll, stalk acquaintances and some of my best friends, and laugh a “ha ha” when I need to. Then I get off the app. It’s been so interesting to see how my addiction to it seems to be healed and maybe that is part perspective, part my feed isn’t that deep but that seems to be working for me reintegrating it back into my life to some extent. I do not plan to keep using social media the same way I used to, I think saving it for the random checking in is balance to me. I am still conflicted on how much of my life I want to share there, especially when it comes to my kid. I feel like I might become a close friends only person and I am okay with that.

I think my shareable takeaway here is to evaluate the WHY behind everything we do and assess if that aligns with our WHAT. WHAT am I doing? WHY am I doing?

Thanks for reading and I hope this is helpful to someone out there feeling similar to things about the complicated space that is social media.

---

The spring has brought a lot of change, new friends and a fresh outlook. I think I am finally shifting out of hibernation mode.

In other news, I am in rewriting and editing phase for my book so you all can expect me to be a ghost here once again.

Not a spooky ghost, friendly, like Casper <3