so, is it worth it? :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 27th 2024

Dear soft heart,

I’d love to start part 3 of this series by telling you about my experience of the withdrawal of Instagram once I decided to get off – once I had faced, and worked through, my fears of survival that were interconnected with both my workaholism and the use of the app.

When I first got off Instagram, it’s like the world went quiet – like what it sounds like during a peaceful snowfall with barely any wind. It was like I stepped out of a crowded shopping mall. Sweet relief. No more bracing, squinting my eyes because the lights and the noises too bright and too loud were assaulting my sensory profile.

At first, it felt like ouff. Got out of there alive.

Then it felt like a deep scary void.

I think for me, I was scared I wouldn’t matter to anyone anymore. This was the hardest feeling to tolerate and be with in Instagram withdrawal. That I felt I could just die one day and no one would care because I wasn’t going to be relevant to them in any way anymore.

Basically, the feeling of being insignificant. Social media has this way of making you feel like you are significant, especially if you are making content that people resonate to, or somehow get famous through it. For me the former was true.

I didn’t get famous, but I did feel this sense of what I did mattered. And thus I mattered.

This was true - what I did did matter, and thus I mattered- but to not feel significant to myself outside of what I produced, to not have much inherent self-worth until I proved myself or succeeded, was hard to contend with. I had a lot of tending to myself to do.

The version of me before I got on social media was a bright, naïve, hopeful girl who felt fundamentally unlovable. And who was trying to compensate with purpose and passion that she felt like she was a burden because of her differences due to disability (autism) and also due to the limitations of her chronic illnesses.

In a clever way, I created a world on social media for about a decade where I shared myself and people started caring about me because of that and I them.

When I announced I was taking my social media sabbatical in early 2020, I got messages and messages and messages of people saying that their social media world for them would not be the same with me not being there.

I was attached to the people I interacted with on social media in a way that was unusual, and they were attached to me. I know I did social media differently than a lot of people. I was a non-fiction, storyteller, memoir writer on there.

And as this writer, I was fiercely open, almost wildly authentic, and I had this transparency that stood out. There was no clear hierarchy in my online world. I was the same as you. And that was all real. It was refreshingly… autistic. I was unafraid of being judged for being human somehow. And this created love for me.

I appreciated this love, as I wrote about in Can You Turn The Lights Off?, the start of my writing career, made possible by social media, made me loved and appreciated for who I was when I had spent an entire lifetime thus far often being punished for it.

I do not think that this way of meeting my needs for love, for being seen and heard, for being important is embarrassing or less than.

This is why I cannot deny, that social media was life changing for me. I cannot hate social media. I cannot banish social media from the fabric of what made me, me.

I am grateful for the time I spent from 2014 to 2022, those 9 glorious years, connecting with people.

This will never not be true.

And yet, I wanted to leave.

I wanted to leave because one, I found ways to meet my needs over this near decade of social media use, that did not implicate my phone any longer. I saw how unsustainable for my health trying to meet my needs like this, all on social media, was long term.

Two, I wanted to leave because I was addicted and being addicted, doing something over and over again despite the fact that it yields negative consequences for me, is not comfortable for me over time. I like being sober. I am my truest, unmasked, self when I am sober.

And three, social media became inaccessible for me as an autistic person.

Prior to the pandemic, social media during the day was sort of for the outcasts. Everyone else was at work.

Then, everyone came onto social media because we all started working from home, not just the weirdos and the disabled. To me, this morphed a safe place for me into what felt like my least favourite place on earth: the school cafeteria.

Everything started becoming increasingly loud, and there were new social rules to everything. I could not keep up is the truth.

Me, double fisting juices. For the ‘gram.

Are we stuck on social media? (probably not!)

I’ve observed that our deepest longings on social media make so much sense, like for example, when I really wanted engagement (likes, comments and the sort), it was because I didn’t feel appreciated well for my efforts probably as a whole in my life. And then I would look for it in the people who consume my work online. When I began to meet that need in other ways, both internally and externally, my need for engagement or any possible resentment for a lack of it on social media(s), lessened.

I notice though that everyone feels like this in our own ways. And that we could use what social media brought up in us to explore ourselves – definitely as a sort of alchemical process as I shared in part 2 of this series.

If I really observe what people are scared about around being on social media, or even leaving social media, myself included, we are all dealing with really important tender things that deserve our care and attention. I’ve got so much love and compassion for us all because of this. It may be easy to dismiss our huge reactions and feelings about social media as oh, it’s just social media. And it is social media, but it interfaces with our humanness in profound ways. I won’t get into all the ways it was built to be addictive here, I’m sure you’ve already read those pieces/ books, and seen those movies/ documentaries and thought oh shit, this is messed up. And yet, we still struggle with our relationship around it all because we do have an innate need for connection, and validation and love. I think we take our power back by knowing there are other ways, other than social media I mean, to get these needs met. Perhaps they are harder to build up a resource bank of, and these other internal and external resources aren’t as instantaneous or socially status upholding, but it is still possible.

For a while I gave a workshop locally in person that was called Turn Up The Zen. These were the types of pictures that would be promo for it. Marketing, man. There is always a way!

What 2022 brought to my social media healing experiment.

At the beginning of 2022, I began a sharp descent into an autistic burn out I had not planned to be unable to bounce back from quickly with some rest, a dark room, a summer off, etc – the way I had coped with my autistic burn outs in the past.

I was experiencing a familial trauma, and the chronic illnesses that I have lived with since I was about 13, which were largely in remission for several years at this point, meaning I was pretty symptom free, came out of said remission.

I started feeling like I had no skin.

So this is the context in which I was meeting Instagram in the year 2022. Social comparison enveloped me when using the app in ways I had never experienced before.

Instagram started being this thing I was using for nothing productive. Before, it was easier to justify why I used it so much. It was for work! But now, all I was actually using it for was to look at people’s worlds and decide I was less than them when compared to.

The years of pandemic isolation were surely not helping, perhaps reaching an unmanageable height for me, and the isolation somehow got worse when I opened the Instagram app, not the other way around.

I’ve heard many chronic illness sufferers say social media is their only social contact and is a lifeline for them because of that. That makes sense for me, and at points in my social media journey as a spoonie, this was true for me too. However, now, I just felt more other’ed. I compared myself heavily to my peers who were in seasons of great expansion – getting married, having babies, having the most successful business years of their careers. Me? In bed eating plain rice pasta with peas and olive oil trying to manage not to shit myself whilst trying to survive gruelling chronic insomnia. It was only fueling my envy to keep scrolling.

There were officially no more pros for me to be on there, so I decided to make a plan to at least try out leaving for good and give myself some space to feel what it felt like to not use it at all (which became this very year I’ve been referring to this whole series).

I was curious. Perhaps I would still feel raging social comparison off the app, because it was something that lived in me that I needed to fully address, or perhaps I wouldn’t at all, it was just the app and its co-factors that stimulated me to feel this way to engage me in consumerism of all kinds.

For me, I found out that I don’t compare myself much, and usually not at all, when I am not stuck in a virtual space that tells me I am unsafe in a myriad of ways, that my diet isn’t good enough or the right kind, that my house is not healthy or chic enough, that I am not beautiful enough, nor wealthy enough, nor interesting enough, nor educated enough, nor involved enough, nor cool enough, and definitely not relationally savvy enough.

The plan:

The plan became that after I had launched my book Can You Turn The Lights Off? I would try life completely off social media and see if it improved my mental, physical and spiritual health.

I went into sharing my book very intentionally; I went in at specific hours, posted, shared some stories, answered any messages, chatted a bit, logged out. It worked. I was happy with the results and I didn’t regret going back on it for a few months. But I was lucid about it all now. The Instagram app was not somewhere I felt energized and stabilized participating in anymore- both in sharing and in witnessing.

I invited those who wanted to stay in contact with me to sign up for my newsletter(s). I have two of them – my business one – The Emily Beatrix Consulting newsletter where I share my business offerings (1-1 services, group coaching enrolment, classes) up to 4 times a year only (once per season, if needed). And my personal essays one – the one you are reading right now, The Soft Heart Newsletter, previously The Beatrix Newsletter. Both those opt-ins are on the main page of my website.

My Instagram profile (@emily__beatrix) is still up with my content that existed until October 2nd 2022 as an archive, but I no longer use it and my settings are set that no one can leave comments and I don’t follow anyone. There is only a bio that reads “for current work/art, visit emilybeatrix.com” and as of November 15th 2023, a post that states clearly that I am no longer using the app and to check out my website for opportunities to experience my work or my art. If someone finds my past content helpful, awesome. And if someone finds my website through Instagram, that’s cool too.

Thank you to Amelia Hruby for the help on that – please check out Amelia’s work if you want to leave social media and you have a business, (OH THE FEARS!).

Signing books in my dining room after a get together for my first book back in 2014. I’d write the longest entries in the books. Peep the more OG iphone - the instagram app was already downloaded on there. This was right before I got super addicted to social media. I stopped drinking in 2014, so my addictions just transferred, ayo!! Now I am a sober gal all around.

What I find hard about it.

Honestly, doing something that you did for nearly 10 years all the time, and having that thing feel like you, and then having that same thing no longer feel like you, is extremely scary. What I mean is - when I wrote non-fiction and shared my life on social media as a writer and my ideas and my tools as a coach - I felt like me.

There was never a moment I didn’t like it. I never felt out of integrity or out of alignment until I did. Sure, there were moments where it was hard perhaps, but there was never a time in which I felt like, this doesn’t ultimately feel good.

And now, when I do it, I do not feel like me anymore. Yet, it’s the same action.

This is such a mind-fuck. I struggled with this. It was a huge identity grief, leaving this Instagram thing. I was no longer the me I had known for so long. There was a period, there are still periods of getting to know who I am now, and it can feel like I miss the old version of me that never questioned this or felt out of alignment with social media.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve lost an ease about life not being on social media. And sometimes, it shows up in such frivolous ways I don’t expect that make me feel limited. I can’t just get on instagram and look up an actor I like after watching a tv show for example.

Also, there is just the loneliness factor of it all. I was used to having at least 10 conversations per day on Instagram. PER DAY! (That’s just my base line estimation, it could have been more.) How did I even manage? Some of them were long and profound life changing discussions, some of them were short and funny and sweet, but yes, I usually touched based and chatted with about 10 people per day. That’s 70 conversations at least per week.

I don’t have those anymore. I talk to very little people nowadays.

To vision that reality for myself a few years ago, especially as a 4-time Gemini, was so incredibly boring. It sometimes is as boring as I projected. For me, my life quality does decrease when I have no good conversations to look forward to. Social media facilitated those so easily for me. I miss this aspect of it.

And the other thing I struggle the most with about being off the grid is that it’s extremely counter culture. I lose some belonging with my peers or the world at large because of not engaging with it. When mostly everyone else that you know is doing something and you’re not, you can and you definitely do feel left out at times.

I was ahead of my time with social media being all about Taylor Swift. I sat (stood and danced) in the pit at 1989. SHE WOULD JUST SWING THIS GOLF CLUB AROUND! IT WAS WILD!

In an ombre sundress in Los Angeles sitting on the jeep I rented. Also, for the gram!

The real with you advantages of being off social media…

Is it worth it?

Now, at the end of 2023, in addition to the benefits I wrote in part 1 & 2 of this series when I began to decrease my social media usage, like…

having found ways to make my business’ marketing happen off the social media apps
shedding phone and screen addiction
successfully untangling myself from workaholism
increasing my presence and embodiment in my daily world and re-establishing hobbies
regaining a sense of privacy in my life
and increasing my time for creative fulfilment (I wrote a whole memoir that is published and a whole poetry book that is going to be published for example, in addition to writing 75+ personal essays for my newsletter(s) since 2020)

There are also a ton of other benefits I’ve observed being off social media completely for a year…

I have found my own rhythm and I do the things I actually like doing, which become really clear to you when no one else is going to witness you doing them. I would grow flowers even if no one ever saw them; I would go biking even if no one ever knew about it; I would have hammocks in my yard even if I couldn’t show them off; I would have a walking practice even if there was no one to tell.
My authentic sense of self is strengthened with no big or small influencers as a part of my information processing – I don’t feel like I am missing out on trips for example, and I want less in general. I stopped shopping – clothes, home goods, excess supplements, health trinkets/ gadgets. All I buy now from a consumerism place are books. And even my book choices are different as they are no longer influenced from social media.
Growing the ability to self-source that I am good enough is so precious to me. With no one to validate that with likes or engagement on social media, it’s made me sane and happy to rely on myself for this.
A huge benefit for me is also to not know what a lot of people are up too en masse, unless I am in direct relationship with them. I really love that I don’t watch my exes insta stories for example. I love that I don’t know what everyone I went to high school is up too.
I decide when I interact with the news and branch into the global whole as an individual, and this is when I have capacity and resource myself to thoughtfully engage and integrate any information I read and serve from this place. This allows me to also choose to have my news more locally too - I love mutual aid and I have found myself being much more involved in my local community since not being on SM. I am not desensitized to news anymore. I’ve observed social media makes a lot of us so overwhelmed that to survive, we become apathetic.
For me, not having too much information at once, or the potential for doom-scrolling downloaded onto my phone, allows my executive functioning to come back – I clean my kitchen now as a priority with ease, I have energy to brush my teeth, my lack of impulse control, especially around addictive behavior does not rule the show anymore– I do – and I am more flexible as my emotional regulation is better, etc.

So yes, it is absolutely worth it.

This is the essential photo of chapter TWENTY-EIGHT in can you turn the lights off - California. Except this moment was probably not the ones I wrote about because it got captured by someone, which meant I was probably not as present. Being perceived is stressful.

Is Substack social media?

When I joined Substack last year as a platform, it was not a social media platform yet, at least in the way I understood it, it was a newsletter publishing platform. Substack seemingly made their money a la Patreon. They took a cut of the writer’s subscriptions fees. This made sense to me as in this was why they weren’t charging us money upfront like other newsletter platforms like Mailchimp.

Now, of course, post spring 2023, Substack has social media features. However, you can still use it sans the app, which to me then feels like you can still use it as a newsletter platform without the social media features; you receive the letters in your inbox that you signed up for - and you’re not engaging in any kind of algorithm. You send out your letters, send them to your people’s inboxes, and you log out. There is a way to use Substack without it being a social media app if you choose, but it certainly seems to have morphed into one if you’d like to use it as such as well.

I personally have not used it much like a social media app or platform so I don’t feel the same issues I did experience with the big 3 social media platforms, however I don’t doubt these issues can apply if you are using it as such. I may just not feel them yet.

I also think Substack is for writers mainly so you aren’t really coming across as many people both from your life and also at large here – this is helpful for me. It’s also, apart from little thoughts on notes, usually long form content that you find here, so I personally am less likely to doom scroll various 10-25 minute articles and essays. I usually read one or two, feel informed, changed, helped, curious, and then I naturally want to go do something else. I regard Substack a bit like I regard the news I consume too. I am typically not getting on here unless I am resourced and have capacity to engage meaningfully and think critically.

I know many people (I’m referring to writers, artists and creatives etc) left Instagram or Twitter to come to Substack to avoid the issues we all faced with those social media platforms and it can feel disheartening that Substack is bringing them up for us again.

For me, at this time, I am not going to try to make money through Substack or try to be featured as a publication of the month/ year, or get into the cool people club, etc. So, I am not the best equipped to describe anything around Substack as social media or networking site, or as a potential sales funnel, past this.

I do know this however: for me, social media does not work. As clearly outlined in this series you’re reading. So, yeah, I wouldn’t have a problem moving my personal essay newsletter (this one - The Soft Heart Newsletter) back to a newsletter platform that has no additional social media features if that is best for my health and Substack becomes unmanageable or inaccessible for me in a social media sort of way. My business offering newsletter exists through my site, so that is convenient.

I do like that you do seem to own your data on Substack fairly straight forwardly, so if you find me on Substack, like my personal essays, and give me your email address, I can save it and not lose touch with you if I were to move newsletter platforms. Something other social medias never did.

In my pinterest beach dream life instagram era. This era contained many floppy hats and I felt very internally pressured about getting to the beach to get good shots all the time to show off the life I had+/ aspired to, rather than being embodied. *face palm* What’s all this dream life stuff good for when you’re not even chewing your food because you’re so addicted to your devices?

The conclusion:

I got used to life not having access to social media. And I liked it that way. And so at some point at around the one year off mark, I decided this was a permanent decision for me for the foreseeable future. Of course, this may change one day. But for now, this feels like the correct decision for me.

In the fall of 2022 into the end of January 2023, I wrote a lot more personal essays, but by the end of Jan 2023, I realized that I didn’t want to be a ‘public figure’ for a bit.

I am a writer, not an influencer (or a public persona, or a brand). The two in the age of social media can feel interchangeable, but they don’t have to be.

I still want to write, but I like the practice that no one knows what I am up too or thinking or feeling for a while or daily. I like that the main way of interaction with me is in my books, and not in a social media presence or even a consistent blogging or podcasting way.

What if I wanted to be even more private? Anonymous at times, outside of my big bodies of work like my books? So, I gave myself permission to be and just write when I felt moved to. No schedules or deadlines after a decade of just that. I wrote a small handful of pieces since that I really liked -

Especially The light/ shadow of autism

and I am not a top or a bottom

And other than that, I privately have been healing both autistic burn out and assisting my body in healing the chronic illnesses I experience in this lifetime back into remission if possible.

My healing journey has not been linear. If anything, without the distraction of Instagram, my body and my mind and my soul had room to be heard more and there was a lot of things to learn, integrate, find solutions and resolution to. This meant that things got worse before they started getting better.

All in all,

I am grateful for what social media brought to my life and especially what it showed me about myself.

If you enjoyed this series, I think you’d love my book Can You Turn The Lights Off?

Here is the blurb that describes it if you want to know what it’s about:

"Born in a neurotypical heteronormative society, Emily didn’t fit in. In this coming-of-age story, Emily confronts addiction and finds sobriety as she rises from the ashes of developmental trauma, battles with ableism, and recovers from rape. As she grows up, and embarks on a profound healing journey, she realizes that a square peg never fits into a round hole. In her quest to accept herself, she comes out as gay and discovers she is autistic.

Now she tells the world who she is, instead of letting the world prescribe who she’s expected to be. These are the stories that will lead us to heart-exploding, throat-tugging, slight tear-inducing acceptance and celebration, for ourselves and for each other.

A year off social media part 3