Warning. Social Media Can Be Hazardous to Your Creativity
And Your Creative Well-Being is Worth Protecting
These last 3 weeks I have thought about quitting 5,237 times. I have felt like a failure at least 2.4x a day and dodged panic attacks approximately 4.87x a day.
Putting the gloves 🥊 🥊 on and duking it out with my anxiety-riddled brain. Hard pass.
It just makes everything worse. It turns a boxing ring into a spiral that leads nowhere helpful.
Then there’s the coulda-shoulda-woulda committee billing me for unauthorized overtime. 🧐
So what do you do when the world is spinning out of control and nothing seems to work correctly anymore?
Well, I can tell you what NOT to do.
Since Instagram switched its algorithm and has all but destroyed my account’s newly attained reach1, life has been one big not-very-fun-emotional rollercoaster here.
(This is my livelihood so just permanently disappearing into a forest isn’t an option.)
I tried deep-diving all the new and greatest content strategies. I binged 47 YouTube videos from experts in the field, with a notepad and pen in hand.
Spoiler. Not one thing worked and I rapidly became a seething tearful definition of a hot mess. And felt like an abject wreck of a failure.
It made me want to quit altogether.
Social media is brutal. I never realized how much until my account grew last year.
It gets in your head. It plays games with your focus and your sense of worth.
It makes you think you are growing— before completely pulling the rug out from under you, just as you think you’ve found the right rhythm that works for all involved.
Listening to the tech bros and social media mavens hope-baiting you with their clients’ success on Insta and YouTube. Not in any way helpful. It can be devastating.
Not because you don’t get the results or numbers. Because you compromise your creative soul trying to get there.
WARNING: Excessive following of the latest trending sounds and hooks can lead to the rending and ending of your creative well-being.
Here’s what I’m trying instead. I don’t know what will work or be beneficial or not. I’m kinda tossing spaghetti to the wall to see what sticks.
Unfollowing all social media experts. I can look up trending music if I want to on my own, thanks. I don’t enjoy memes and pov hooks and thus will no longer be attempting to create them.
Posting whatever the heck I want to when I want to, as long as I know it will serve whoever does see it. Almighty algorithm be damned. («I mean that in the literary sense). I mean all of us found eachother, right? I have to trust the right people will keep doing the same.
Focusing on the things I can control… like picking wildflowers and painting them. Like creating beautiful things and space to share them.
Using the head & heart space IG took over to write more here on Substack, a platform that has no algorithm. Just a lovely feed of people you choose to hear from.
Growing my email family so I can get the right encouragement and info to the right people at the right time. (You can sign up here if you haven’t already.)
Writing and sharing online, it is so easy to highlight the wins without the struggles.
That feels like a disservice, because gosh does it drive false expectations that can make people feel broken when the same results don’t happen for them.
If there are things in your world that drain your creativity, you have permission to explore changing as many of them as you have control over.
Your creative well-being is worth protecting.
I’m beyond grateful for you being here,
My IG account grew from 1.2K last year to 84K this year. It’s amazing growth for which I am very grateful. But in the last few weeks, my tiny account saw better reach than my big one now does after the meta gods did their thing. It is completely defeating. I’m opting out of being beholden to their attention economy as much as I possibly can and focusing on building value in places I have control over, like here.