When it comes to adopting social media, I was one of the relatively late ones to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I’d seen the rise of MySpace and it just hadn’t interested me. It was a friend I’d not seen for a while who encouraged me to get going with Facebook. He thought I’d love catching up with people there. And, I did enjoy it. Oftentimes, a bit too much. When I go in, I tend to go all in. Before I knew it, I had hundreds of friends, thousands on Twitter and Instagram.

Social media became not just a tool for keeping up with friends and family but for making new friends and growing a blog or two. At one point, I loved social media; running courses and classes on how to use it to grow community groups, pouring energy and love into the content, facilitating a viral campaign, helping and supporting, and spending hours chatting back and forth with real-life friends and others I got to know online.

I’D ALSO BEEN ‘SHARENTING’

When I say I loved social media, I mean it. I was full-on addicted – particularly to Instagram – but there was enjoyment too. However, I’d also been ‘sharenting’: sharing information and photographs of our child online. Then I read this article by Mother Pukka: Private: No Access. Like a ton of bricks, it hit me that I was sharing a lot of myself online and of our young daughter. The implications of it started to niggle. I was being so open and so vulnerable online – not just about my life experiences, but hers too. I don’t know about you, but my teenage years were spent trying to blend in so I wouldn’t be bullied again. It occurred to me that in my ‘sharenting’ I was laying all of our daughter’s life out for anyone and everyone. It felt, acutely, as though that could be something that might come back and bite her on the bum later in life. When we post things online, we truly don’t know what happens to them. Things are screenshotted, shared, and saved. Sometimes, they’re used in ways we can’t ever imagine. I felt as though I’d been naive and suddenly, I felt a little scared of it all. That was new and started to gnaw away.

I OPENED THE DOOR OF VULNERABILITY

When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we open the door of vulnerability for others to more easily walk through. In our personal lives, this is a beautiful thing when shared with the right people; it fosters connection and empathy, reduces shame and guilt, and we benefit hugely from mutual support. I very publicly opened the door of vulnerability when I started talking about my lived experiences of depression online, on TV, during a TEDx talk, on the radio, in books, gosh, literally everywhere. I was frustrated with feeling beholden to the stigma of mental ill health and of feeling this deep dark shame and I poured that, and my experiences, into creating a huge hub of help for people. But, on reflection, I wish I’d done so from behind the scenes and I wish I hadn’t been so earnest in putting my name to stuff because I didn’t have the emotional, mental or energetic capacity to cope with the ever-increasing emails and the DMs I received in response. I’m someone who loves helping people, it’s something I feel drawn to, and it’s a purpose I feel strongly in my bones. Online is exponential though and I could have spent all day replying to comments, emails and messages I received on my personal account and not get through them all – going to bed feeling awful for not replying, not helping, worrying about those I hadn’t had a chance to acknowledge. The messages more often than not spoke of topics which would ordinarily come with a trigger warning which became more and more emotionally difficult for me to process and to have any semblance of emotional nor mental boundaries. We all want to feel seen, heard and understood and I was doing a crappy job of seeing and hearing those who had come to me to be seen and heard. My mental health was crumbling.

THE FINAL STRAW

In the end, I got myself, what some would call, a troll. I don’t love that term but it’s a widely understood one and for the purpose of this, I’ll use it. Someone started sending me accusatory messages on Instagram which were angry, rude and spiteful. I’d block and they’d reappear under a different profile. The gains of social media were now far outweighed by the cons. It was time to leave and I did; I permanently deleted both my Twitter and Facebook. But, with Instagram? It was a soft-leave, I left the door ajar should I ever change my mind and I didn’t delete my account – it just stayed there, stagnant, until I watched ‘Can I Tell You A Secret?’ last night.

Since I stopped using social media 9 months ago, I’ve become more and more certain that our brains just aren’t designed to cope with it. Added to that, the endless scrolling acts as a numbing agent to the more icky-feeling feelings which tell us such a lot and give us the chance to address and work through things. And then, there’s the dark stuff. Social media has been a named cause of far too many young people taking their lives. It’s wreaking havoc on the mental health and self-esteem of our young ones. And us, not-so-young ones, as well. Tactics used to keep people gambling are employed to keep us online, we feel as though we have autonomy over it all, but truthfully, we don’t. Our habits, our preferences, our timespans, how we see ourselves – it’s all being influenced by algorithms. Watching a documentary about the lives of so many women being splintered apart by a cyberstalker, shook me. It shook me enough for me to hard-leave Instagram. I’m finally done.

WHERE DOES THAT ALL LEAVE THIS BLOG?

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that sometimes I feel like I’m contradicting myself in having this space to write – it’s still on the internet, for all and sundry to discover, read and see. It has taken me a while to understand what I want this space to be and what I’d like to share. It’s also taken me a while to unpick a fear of being seen and heard which grew on the back of all that’s gone since I created that first Facebook profile in 2009. The difference in this space compared with how I used social media is wholly in how I’ve changed. I consider and reflect and press pause before hitting that ‘publish’ button. I still draw on my life experiences in my writing but I won’t always talk about them in the first person tense. I intend that this is a space for stuff that’s (hopefully!) self-helpful and a space that encourages and supports creativity. In writing this paragraph, it occurs to me how nuanced all this is and what a tricky landscape it is to navigate. Ultimately, we have to make the decisions which feel right for us, accepting that we won’t always understand how things will turn out until they’ve turned out.